


chasing paradise

by whiskeyinthejar



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Harry no longer wants to pine but he does anyway, Louis reads poetry and is mysterious, M/M, On Haitus, Zayn pines almost as much as Harry and reads terrible literature, haitus haha at my past self, i'm so sorry to everyone who wanted this finished, okay. this fic has been abandoned due to lack of author interest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2017-12-25 13:20:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyinthejar/pseuds/whiskeyinthejar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry's not pining to the point where he definitely is, and if desperation drives him to increasingly desperate measures, then that's not his fault (except it most likely is).</p><p>-</p><p>(An AU inspired by the film '10 Things I Hate About You'.)</p><p><b>Edit:</b> Abandoned, and incomplete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> At long last I can present to the lovely online public a chaptered fic! This is something that sort of sprouted from a very vague idea into a full blown plan; as of yet, there's eleven chapters planned, but people who know me even a little bit would be able to tell you I don't keep very well with my own plans. Updates will probably be (very) sporadic, so if you can bear my incapability to write when I'm studying, I very much hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Also everything is English because I am and I have no idea how an American high school even work so this could be educating?
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events should be in no way associated with any person, and I do not profit from or intend to offend.

** One: I hate the way you talk to me (and the way you cut your hair) **

If there is one thing Harry can trust himself to do, it’s to make a good decision and stick to it. (Well, they’re not always a _good_ decision, as such, but he tries, and that’s what counts). So it’s come to pass that this year, there will be no pining.  
None.  
At all.

In fact, in the boundaries of pining laws, he will no longer classify as a person likely to pine, or mope, or in any way brood over his epic tragedy of a romantic life. And, you know, he feels pretty good about that, seeing as how he’s spent the last one year and four days doing the polar opposite.

Really, taking English Lit for A-Level was the biggest cock up Harry ever made. Although, it’s not as though he could really plan ahead for a Louis Tomlinson. Louis Tomlinsons just tend to come along and royally fuck everything up (like unexpected roadworks, or premature labour). He really shouldn’t be blaming the class, or Louis, for the fact that Harry tends to fall deeply and (stupidly) wretchedly in love with people he hasn’t strung full sentences around yet.

So, enough is enough. The one-sided love affair with Louis is to cease, Harry can actually concentrate during lessons instead of thinking about how wondrously beautiful Louis looks with his body silhouetted in gold sunlight, and it’ll be an all round wonderful year for everyone.

*

“Really, mate? You’re completely over him?” It’s lucky Harry’s got to know Zayn well enough that he can detect the subtle sarcasm in his voice, or otherwise, he could make the foolish mistake of thinking Zayn is actually interested in his well-being and mental health.

“Of course.” He says, pulling out one of the chairs next to him and sitting down. The sixth form area could do with swivel chairs, really. Gotta love a swivel chair. Perhaps he should start a petition, or something.

“Not to be rude, or anything-” Harry calls bullshit on that internally, because it’s not like Zayn to pass up a chance to insult him, especially this early in to term, “but you’ve been hankering after this guy for what, a year and four days?”

“Hankering?” Harry asks in disbelief. Yeah, he should stop Zayn reading the shitty romance novels all the time, but it’s worth it (occasionally) to see Zayn swoop around melodramatically, figuring himself as the smouldering lovelorn hero. Which is totally Harry’s role. “And there’s no way you’ve been keeping count.”

“You basically have the date written in your calendar. Not to mention the time you sent me a text reminding me it was yours and his six month anniversary. If you’d been dating.”

“The fact you said not to mention completely devalues your point.” Harry mutters, and he can feel heat pooling in his cheeks and now is not the time for his body’s betrayal.

“The fact you’re actually depressing enough to send me reminders of an anniversary that doesn’t exist completely devalues your _life._ ” Replies Zayn, pulling a paperback with a bent front cover out of his bag. And Harry isn’t an expect, but books with titles like _The Passion Of The Lust Flower_ are usually for people who’ve completely lost any sense of what romance actually is. There’s probably a balcony scene and heartfelt declarations abundant.

“How do you not read that without experiencing a violent need to regurgitate?” He asks, and Zayn doesn’t look up from the page to flip him off.

See, this, he can do. Friendly banter and not a single hint of pining.

*

“So, as you can see here, Duffy has said that she’ll give her lover an onion. Does anybody know why this is?”

No, no one does. Harry’s not surprised, because who the fuck gives an onion as a valentine’s present? He thought it was all about roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates (perhaps he’s been hypnotized by one of Zayn’s trashy novels).  
Mr Harries sighs deeply, and Harry can empathise. If he was forced to come back to work just to teach a bunch of adolescents the finer points of literature, he’d sigh too. Perhaps enough to cause serious jaw damage, and he could go home again.

“Look at the line ‘I am trying to be truthful’. What d’you think she’s trying to be truthful _about?_ ”

Really, Harry admires his enthusiasm. Or his determination. He’s too far away from the desk to make out the expression in Mr Harries’s eyes. He supposes it could always be that of conceded defeat, but it doesn’t usually come this early in the year.

Harry’s just come to the conclusion that he’s doing a very good job of _not_ staring shamelessly at Louis, when Louis himself speaks up. It’s probably a mark of how pathetic Harry is that he’s knows it’s him without having to look, despite only ever having heard Louis speak on a handful of occasions, but his voice is higher than Harry’s, rough and sweet like sandpaper and honey.

“She’s trying to be truthful about love. It’s not ‘a red rose or a satin heart’, because the person you love can hurt you, and make you cry, like an onion. So, she’s saying, she’ll love you fiercely for as long as you’re faithful, but if you’re not then it’s over. The onion’s just a metaphor of love.”

If Harry wasn’t ninety percent sure that the only emotion his teacher could feel was weariness, he’d say he was in love. Harry can wholly sympathise.

He guesses the not pining thing isn’t going to work out, after all.

“Exactly, Louis. Exactly that. So, when she says that ‘It will blind you with tears like a lover”, Duffy is saying that a lover can break your heart, and that is the truth of love, not all the cute presents people buy each other on Valentine’s day...”

Harry scribbles his requisite paragraph answer to _“Do you think Carol Ann Duffy believes in love?”_ in record time, the ink of the pen tip dragging across the paper in untidy scrawls that he’ll be unable to decipher later, and uses the rest of the time to gaze longingly at Louis as he works, tapping the lid of his pen against his lips as he thinks. In turn, Harry focuses on the pen and the point where it’s touching Louis, black plastic on skin and resting there.

Fuck the pen that it should be so lucky.

And if the bell rings a little too soon for Harry’s mind to have completed memorised the exact way that the light hit Louis’s skin and lit it up golden, or the way that the cream wool of the jumper contrasted against it, then that’s just something entirely unimportant, because Harry is so not moping. He’s going to be an adult this year, and with such ripe old age comes devastating responsibilities, like knowing when to cut yourself loose from unrequited adoration. It’s mind over matter, he tells himself sternly, pushing his books into his bag with enough force that he might be able to zip it up.  
The thing is, no one ever tells the heart any of this.

*

Harry’s never sure whether Zayn dresses like he’s trying to get in on some Italian model convention on purpose, or whether it’s just an accident. Usually, his opinion swings towards the first option, because there’s no way that someone can look that good first thing in the morning, and he knows that an awful lot of time goes on the hair. As in, apocalyptic amounts of time.

“Am I okay?” Zayn asks quickly as soon as Harry’s within earshot. Harry debates joining Mr Harries in the club of despondent and thoughtful sighs, because it seems like somewhere that he could learn a few valuable lessons.

“I don’t know, are you?”

“Don’t be a smart arse.” Says Zayn bitterly, smoothing down the front of his shirt and looking side to side hastily. It’s not that big of a room, to be fair, so he can’t be that far, but obviously Zayn’s paranoia has increased to believing people can materialise out of thin air.

Really, he shouldn’t take solace in the fact that the only romantic tale in any way more pitiful than his own is Zayn’s, but he does anyway, because Zayn’s been hopelessly trying to attract the attention of Liam Payne since he was about fifteen. Or, as Harry likes to tell people, since in the womb (it definitely feels that long).

“You could just talk to him.” Harry says helpfully, and the sour look he gets in return is worth it. Actually, a lot of things are worth riling Zayn up for, he should do it more often.

“So says the King of Not Talking To Object Of Affections.”

“Ouch.” Harry replies without malice; Zayn makes a similar comment most times that Harry mentions Zayn’s inability to hold a conversation with Liam, even though the scenarios are completely different. ‘Cause, you know, Harry won’t talk to Louis because Louis doesn’t essentially talk to anybody, and Harry doesn’t want to find himself put on the blacklist (which, he knows, is probably terrifyingly long and detailed). On the other hand, Liam Payne probably hangs about outside school once it’s over to shield stray kittens from the rain and carry shopping bags for strange women.

“Is he here?” Zayn asks, and Harry spares the cursory look around the room. He spots Liam by one of the computers, talking to a kid with bright hair –the brown roots are showing through, though- and smiling widely enough that lines appear in his cheeks.

“By the computers.” Harry replies, and Zayn exhales thankfully. He goes back to reading his book, eyes flicking from left to right, and Harry knows for an honest to God fact that he’s practiced looking mysteriou and intriguing whilst reading in front of the mirror. It’s practically a marketable skill by now.

Somewhere along the line, Harry came to the conclusion that he and Zayn must have the most unfortunate luck out of every other person in the school, and that’s just with romance alone. If he wanted to include the time that he was locked in the history room for a whole school day, or when Zayn dropped one of his paperbacks by the swimming pool and fell in, fully clothed, picking it up (no one, not even God himself, can know how that happen, because it doesn’t make any _sense_ ), then they’d win the most all round unlucky students too. He could take this up professionally. It could be a sparkling new business venture; think you’re doomed? Give Harry Styles a ring- he’s probably more so!

“Liam approaching.” He mutters to Zayn, who straightens his back immediately and wets his lips. It’s like an ill-fated kind of mating ritual, where the Zayn can be observed attempting to attract the oblivious male of sickening cuteness.

“Hey, Liam,” Zayn says as Liam passes his chair, and Liam stops to look down at Zayn, smile already in place. Come to think of it, Harry’s not sure he’s ever seen Liam _not_ smiling; he’s not sure he really wants to, in case it gives him one of those heart-twisting feelings people get when they see sob stories about kicked dogs on the news.

“Zayn!” Liam replies, beaming like he’s just seen his favourite person in all the world. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, because Harry can just feel Zayn trying to desperately hold on to his composure.

“So, uh, how were your holidays?” Zayn looks at Liam up through his eyelashes -which, you know, are probably longer than Harry’s arms, but he’s over that now- and pouting. Successfully.

“Good, yeah, family went down to Cornwall. Mum’s got some relatives down there, she went to see them. Great ice cream. In Cornwall, I mean, her relatives aren’t great ice cream. That’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible.” Zayn says, and Harry wants to hit himself in the face, or something, because the crap that comes out of Zayn’s mouth when he’s talking to Liam has to be seen to be believed.

“I think ice cream people are.” Liam says seriously, as though he was literally trying to imagine such things in his head. Really, they’re suited to each other, Harry thinks. Good luck to them and their inability to say anything of intelligence.

“Of course.” Zayn nods, putting his book down on the table and moving his hand so it props up his face, one of his fingers just resting on his lower lip. Harry can give praise where it’s due, and Zayn really knows how to work it. He’d say he’s proud, but he’s more inclined to irrational anger at Liam, for not noticing (or caring), and at Zayn, for not moving on (which is not only highly, but _outstandingly_ hypocritical).

“So, did you go anywhere?” Liam asks, and Harry watches absolute confusion flicker across Zayn’s face. It wasn’t even that hard of a question.

“Yeah, I-uh. I went to Scotland.” Zayn says, and Harry stares down at his textbook and tries, valiantly, to not let any smothered noise escape him, because all Zayn had to say was _“No”,_ but the truth doesn’t seem to be achievable for Zayn anymore.

“Oh, where?” Liam says enthusiastically, like there’s nothing more interesting than Zayn’s fictional holiday to Scotland.

“Loch Ness.” Zayn replies promptly, and Harry kicks his shin under the table, because no one fucking goes on holiday in a lake, Zayn, even you should know that. “I mean, around Loch Ness. It was good.”

“Didn’t see any monsters, did you?” Liam cracks, and Zayn blinks earnestly. Previous to now, Harry hadn’t know earnest blinking was possible, but there you are. In the words of Zayn himself, after all, “nothing’s impossible”. Perhaps he should get that tattooed across his arse, or something.

“What?” Zayn says, and still Liam doesn’t stop smiling. He’s like an unstoppable force of blinding happiness.

“You know, the Loch Ness monster? All these people claim to see it?”

“Oh, oh. Yeah. No, we didn’t.” Zayn manages to force out of his mouth, and Liam shakes his head sorrowfully. Yeah, Harry definitely feels like there’s a kicked dog vibe coming off him.

“I’d better get back to work, then.” Zayn says, and the smile drops off Liam’s face completely before resurfacing. Maybe less of a dog, more of a buoy in the ocean.

“See you later.” Liam replies, and the way he says it is so sincere that Harry wants to cry, or write poetry about this moment. Something profound, anyway.

“I really cocked that up, didn’t I?” Zayn says with his face in his hands, and Harry pats his shoulder gently, because beyond that, there’s nothing he can do that won’t make this situation even worse than it already is.

Except compare it with his own love life, but even he doesn’t love Zayn enough for that.

*

Mr Harries seems to have moved on from war poetry. Well, not so much moved on as regressed back to love poems. Suddenly, Harry’s beginning to understand people’s animosity towards love songs, because there’s only so many times he can force himself to think about hearts a fluttering before he needs to exit and perhaps vomit (aggressively).

At least his teacher, with his thinning straw hair and the plumpness of ripe old middle age, is somewhat of a poetry hipster (if that’s possible). All the ones he’s chosen so far have been something quirky and weird and a tad worrying; the onion one of the now legendary lesson Where Louis Talked, for example, ended with a beautiful three lines about lethality and knives. Which, you know, Harry can’t call himself an expert in love –but the unrequited type, yes-, and even he can see that most people in love don’t want a damn onion for a gift, and neither do they want a poem that leaves the reader wondering if perhaps the poet wants to _knife_ their lover. He could do that. Hey, Louis, I really like you, here’s an onion,  you cry at it and I’ll stab you, it’s great.  
Of course, Harry understands the whole ‘the onion is a metaphor for love and it symbolises lovers’ thing, but it doesn’t make it any less _strange._ He’d thought, prior to this, that love poems merely revolved around adoring the sparkle in someone’s eyes and how beautiful their flaws are (a bit like a shitty pop song).

The stellar choice today is ‘To You’, by some guy named Kenneth Koch. Irrationally, the first thing Harry thinks when the sheet is laid down on his desk (it’s a fucking awful photocopy, with the thick black lines at the side where the sides of the book were and smudged, blurred letters making up words making up sentences making up  the poem), is how his name is alliteration. He’d love an alliterated name; perhaps he could be Harry Harries. If he was related to his teacher. Which he so, definitely, is not.

“So, we can see this is definitely a different way of going about doing a love poem.” Harries says, starting up the usual schoolwork spiel, and Harry lets the dust settle in his brain for another hour of trying to figure out where he’s going in life and what impact and meaning this will have to not only the world, but the universe at large. Loving Louis Tomlinson (from afar, from a-fucking-far) will prove to be a fundamental part of this, obviously. Do people get famous through love? He’s not sure.

Romeo and Juliet. He’s like them. Except, you know, without the whole sex and marriage and suicide razzmatazz, ‘cause, frankly, he’d rather live for a while.

“Koch begins the poem with a rather interesting few lines,” Yeah, Harry can second that. ‘I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut that will solve a murder case unsolved for years’ is an odd way to say you love someone. But then, Harry can’t really talk, because he could spout off yards and yards of scrawled on paper that reads about all the different ways he finds himself wanting Louis (and not just that way). Not that he’d start it with a murder case. This isn’t solved in the lines after that, either- there are different comparisons throughout the poem, and it gets more and more confused as it goes on.  
I love you as a kid searches for a goat.  
I am crazier than shirttails in the wind, when you’re near.  
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields always, to be near you, even in my heart.  
I love you as sunlight leads the prow from Hartford to Miami.

“The last lines are just as confused as the rest of the poem, don’t you think? After all of the being swept up and carried away by nonsense, there’s a little calm, right at the end, and you rest. What do you think this poem, as a whole, is trying to symbolize?”

Perhaps Mr Harries does know a thing or two, after all. He sounds like he’s speaking more from experience than the Teaching For Dummies Handbook that can usually be referenced in these situations.

Running his lower lip along his teeth, Harry tries (does he try) to think of a paragraph answer to a question that he can’t really answer at all. The poem doesn’t make sense. Pulling the sheet of paper out from under his book, he studies the blotchy print carefully, as if the meaning might spring out from the ink.

He thinks of Mr Harries’s explanation again; “swept up and carried away”.

He thinks of Louis (but really, when doesn’t he) (except he’s not pining anymore) (so not pining), and he thinks he’s figured it out into a simple sentence.

The poem takes on a journey of falling in love.

(Harry thinks he isn’t half bad at this lesson, after all).

*

“Hey!” Someone says brightly by his ear, and they’re practically chirruping. Only birds are supposed to chirrup, surely human vocal chords can’t physically make that noise-

“Hi?” He questions in reply, shuffling to the side for the virtue of personal space and turning his head so he can see a sliver of some girl’s face (her smile is almost as terrifying as the determination in her eyes). She moves with him, because of fucking course. It’s like a dance of mild harassment. Maybe a samba. She looks like she has enough energy bottled up for a samba.

“I have a proposition to make to you,” Starts the girl. It sounds like she’s reciting this speech of from memory (she probably is). “It concerns you, my brother, and the concept of dating.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes.” She says, nodding, before setting off again. “You see, I find myself in a wholly undesirable predicament. Are you familiar with young, budding romance?”

Harry nods mutely. He’s not sure he can actually create a reply to this.

“Well, I am part of one such romance. And I would very much like to expand upon this relationship, but I cannot do so.” The girl pauses here to let that point sink in, and Harry nods after a few long seconds pass and he comes to the conclusion that she wants confirmation of something. He’s not sure what of, but he gives it anyway.

“Do you know why this is?” She asks, peering at him with wide eyes, and Harry debates the idea of moving back again.

“No, I have no idea who you are.” He replies, testing the waters and stepping backwards. She follows.

“Well,” She says, like he’s obviously missing a clue. “My dad said I, the unfortunate maiden, cannot date until my elder brother does too.”

This point is also allowed to settle inside Harry’s mind, and something in him begins sinking.

“So, uh, you want me to-”

“I want you to go out with my brother.” She says calmly, watching his face (exactly like how a hawk circles it’s prey. He imagines, having never been either).

“Uh,” Harry responds, with supreme eloquence and intelligence, and the girl sighs, pushing her hair out of her eyes and tucking it behind her ear. It slips out again immediately, but she doesn’t bother moving it again. Also, the ‘ye olde’ style of speech seems to have taken it’s departure.

“I’ll bloody pay you, if that’s what it takes.” She offers, and Harry pulls his bottom lip under his teeth. Personally, he wants to know what’s so fundamentally un-dateable about her brother that she thinks it’s worth _paying him,_ but, you know. Money is money. Although, he’s not sure if this is one of the rungs on the ladder to prostitution, or something.

“Why me?” He asks, because it’s good to get all the facts. Perhaps he should’ve asked who she is, first, but whatever. He’ll get around to it. In reply, she sighs again. Maybe she should see a GP about that. Constant sighing could prove highly dangerous to her jaw. Perhaps.

“I asked another guy who told me to ask you- I guess you know him? Reading a book, dark eyes, I’d ride him like a pony-”

Harry’s too tired to hear about the way’s that a stranger wants to fuck his best friend. He’ll probably always be too tired for this.

“-and he said look for you. Tall, moping, probably outside the library.”

There’s really no need to describe him that way.

“I don’t _mope._ ” Harry mutters, but she hears him anyway, sighing (again), and waving her hands about emphatically.

“Does it look like I care? Will you date him? I’ll-” she breaks off to plunge her hands in her bag and scrabble about, bringing out a fistful of notes and counting them furiously, fingertips skimming over the edges. The edges of her cyan nail polish is beginning to chip, he notices. “pay you fifty?”

“Pounds?” Harry asks, and she nods.

Who pays _fifty quid_ to date their brother?

“Per date?” He tries, and she squints at him. He’s suddenly learning how squints can look angry. He hurries to placate her, words almost stumbling over each other on their journey out of his mouth. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Lottie.” She says, and before Harry can interrupt she’s off again. “Will you do it? Like, I’ve asked a hundred guys today. More than that. A hundred _thousand._ It’s impossible. I’m beginning to see why he never brings anyone home-”

“Yeah, yeah.” He mumbles, trying to stem the flow. “Who’s your brother?”

“Louis Tomlinson.” Lottie replies quickly, as though saying the name faster gives him less of a chance to change his mind. Reaching forward, she pulls his hand to her and stuffs the notes into his, closing his fingers over the edges.

The part of Harry that was sinking feels like it’s hit the bottom. His heart, though, it’s pattering out a rhythm in a reminder that he needs to stay alive.

“Oh.” He manages, and his voice is fairly steady. That’s something, anyway. Lottie nods seriously, as though Harry isn’t in complete danger of going into cardiac arrest right in front of her. “M’Harry.”

“God, you’re a life saver. A total life saver.” She says earnestly, her eyes looking up at him like he’s been carved out of gold.

Harry thinks that someone should probably save the life saver before he faints.

*

Trying to work up the balls to go and talk to Louis Tomlinson takes Harry a lot more time than expected. Not that, you know, he’d originally thought it’d be a quick walk over and “Hey! Wanna date?” and voila, but this is ridiculous.

“I can’t do it, Zayn, he’s going to hate me. Oh my God, he’s going to shout at me and he’ll hate me and I’ll have blown all my chances, and I shouldn’t have agreed to this, I’m ruining my life for Louis Tomlinson’s sister-”

“Wow, I can hear something,” Zayn says suddenly, breaking into the tide of Harry’s words and cutting him off. “It’s like someone being a feeble, whining boy!”

“You’re just jealous.” Harry murmurs, but it’s too quiet for Zayn to hear. Maybe it’s because Zayn’s giving Liam’s turned back his best “Victim of Destiny” (Harry’s pretty sure that was one of the dog-eared books that Zayn carted around for God knows how long in an effort to look romantic and sophisticated) stare. If Harry was less kind, he’d point out that the stare is wasted on someone who can’t see it. Zayn should be thankful that he has friends as good as Harry.

By the time that five days have passed since Lottie’s proposition (or plea, as it appeared to be at the time), Harry comes to another good decision. Well, he’s not sure (read: very sure) that this is a good decision at all, but at least it’s better than the five days of tossing and turning vacillation that led up to it.

Today’s resolution: Go and ask out Louis Tomlinson on a date.

This turns out to be a lot easier said than done, as the saying goes. For starters, Harry doesn’t even know where Louis goes when he isn’t in lessons, because he doesn’t talk to anyone in school, and wherever he can think of, there are students there. Really, Harry only hangs about outside the library because it’s the only place that he thinks Louis could be.

So, scratching that, he’s left with the option of cornering Louis after English Lit and making good on his declaration then.

The fated lesson arrives on a cold day, where the air is full of invisible needles that prick at your skin until it’s raised with bumps and the tips of your fingers turn numb. The last thing Harry needs is a streaming cold to make himself look attractive, but he’s got one anyway.

Louis, of course, looks sun drenched and beautiful. Naturally.

Mr Harries decided to enthral them all with a poem on war, because love seems to have been a concept entirely too advanced for a class of near adults, and reads out glumly about gas bombs and dying soldiers.

Harry feels kinda bad that he’s paying so little attention to a poem about guys who died so he could be here right now, but he’ll feel upset about that later.

A single second never appeared to draw so slowly before. Was the lesson always this long?

“We can see here that the poet feels _angry_ about the war, about why it happened and how many lives it took...”

Time is supposed to pass is fragmented sections, dragging it’s feet one moment and speeding ahead the next, but this isn’t playing fair. Not, of course, that Time has a set of rules by which to play. Fucking time, ruining everything.

When the last few minutes have counted down, Harry looks down at his page and he doesn’t remember writing any of that at all; his subconscious must’ve been looking out for him all this time. ‘Good on you, subconscious,’ he self-congratulates, and slides his books into his bag eagerly, because Louis has an uncanny habit of flitting in and out the door before Harry notices.

No, Louis’s still here, standing by the desk by the window, and Harry feels like the weight of the world is pushing down on his chest and stopping him breathing, he can’t breathe because his heart is pumping too fast, he thinks, and that shouldn’t be possible but it is, and Louis’s hair is highlighted in different browns and golds by the sunlight-

“Louis!” He calls out, the name drawn out and long on his tongue. It’s a good name to wrap his mouth around, he decides, all vowel noises and soft. It’s a name you can wrap around you when it’s cold, like fire.

From where he’s moving to cross the room, Louis stops, looking at Harry like he’s never seen him before. He probably hasn’t, and that is not the point Harry needs to be focusing on right now.

Breathe. In, out, rise, fall.

“I’m, uh. Harry?”

“Are you asking me?” Louis queries, tongue darting out to swipe across his lips.

Fuck.

“No.” Harry says, and he thinks his voice might be one or two or ten octaves too high. “I was, uh. Saying it.”

“Well, you sound confident.” Louis says. ‘It’d be easier if you weren’t the epitome of human beauty,’ Harry thinks acrimoniously, stretching his mouth in a smile that feels like it might carry on stretching until his mouth breaks. Which is, yeah,  not something he wants to be thinking about right now when Louis Tomlinson is standing in front of him and using his salted caramel voice to talk to Harry and-

“You okay?” Louis asks, and Harry blinks. He’s going to blame Louis for the way he keeps zoning out of the conversation, not his terrible control of his own mind.

“Yeah, yeah, fine.”

“So, why d’you want to talk to me?” And there’s the question Harry’d been simultaneously waiting for and dreading. Now it’s here, it’s like his tongue has turned to iron, much to heavy for him to lift or form words with.

“It’s, uh. I wanted to ask you a question.” He forces out of his mouth, and Louis squints like Harry’s something that should probably be kept in a safe room. Probably a padded one. “Do you, um. Do you wanna go on a date? With me?” He clarifies, and there it is.

He just asked out the one great love of his life in his English Lit classroom, with it’s unromantic blue paint peeling on the walls and stucco ceiling, with the door wide open because Mr Harries genuinely doesn’t give a shit if anything’s nicked, with the noise from all the people outside filtering through to them, a blurred in babble of background voices like static.

“No,” Louis says finally, and Harry stares at him for a good ten seconds before letting out a breath he’d somehow been holding for a lot too long, and he was in danger of deoxygenating. “Sorry, Curly, but you’re not my type.”

“No, no. I’m a great date. Seriously. Like, I’ll buy you a pancake, or something, I know this really good pancake place, they do them with Nutella and everything. Or, we could go to Loch Ness, I’ve never been, no one goes on a date to Loch Ness but at least it’s original, I promise I’m a good date-”

“Do you ever shut up?” Louis asks curiously, and well, that does shut him up pretty effectively. Like a bucket of cold water thrown over his head.

Harry thinks that he might feel less dismal if he wasn’t trying to stifle sniffles every two seconds. This whole disaster is definitely the fault of his cold, which makes it the weather’s fault, and if anyone asks, the reason he never made out with Louis Tomlinson or his sister never went on her date, it’s the weather’s fault.

“Uh, sometimes.” Harry says, because Louis has stayed silent after that. There’s a poster behind Louis’s head with different synonyms for ‘sad’. There’s some poetic irony in that, he thinks.

“I’m sorry, Curly, but you’re not my type.” Louis replies, shifting the strap of his bag on his (unfortunately, jumper-covered) shoulder and making as if to leave.

“And what is your type, then?” Harry asks. At least his voice has gone back to normal. He can try for something husky and flirty.

“That’s really nothing to do with you.” Louis says, and yeah, Harry can’t do either husky or flirty. Not even a piss-poor imitation.

“Can’t a guy be interested?”

“They’re not usually.” Louis retorts, and somehow Harry ended up stepping closer to him than he previously thought, and he can see darker flecks of blue inside the irises of Louis’s eyes. There are six on one side, and five on the right.

“Well, I am.” Harry says. Apart from the whole ‘I can be a good date’ thing, he thinks he’s doing pretty well at keeping a lid on his mouth except when necessary. As few words as possible, that’s the trick.

“I don’t think we’ll work out.” Louis says in reply, and Harry frowns because that was not how this conversation was supposed to go. In Zayn’s shitty books (which he doesn’t read, he _doesn’t,_ except he does), when the two characters get really close to each other in the middle of an argument (not that this is an argument), they end up kissing with the passion of true love, and Harry was really looking forward to that.

“Why not?”

“You’re wearing a jumper patterned with lemons.” Louis says, like that explains a whole lot, which it doesn’t and Harry can feel a headache coming to his him like a ten-tonne truck.

“There’s nothing wrong with a lemon patterned jumper, prick.” He says defensively, and oh.

Shit.

“What did you call me?” Louis asks, and his eyes are like particularly unforgiving flint. If flint were blue. The metaphor worked in his head, at least.

“Nothing?” Harry tries, and a better man would’ve crossed his fingers, too.

“There’s no need to get angry, _dickface,_ just ‘cause I turned you down. It’s a little childish, you know.”

Harry could say something about how he hadn’t meant to say it at all, but that feels a lot like conceding defeat, and he can’t do that. His honour is at stake here, after all, and his chances with Louis were blown out of the water already, so why not ruin it more.

“Can’t even take a joke, Louis, you gotta admit that’s a bad sense of humour you’ve got there.”

There’s a brief second that Harry admires the way that Louis’s jaw looks bloody _phenomenal_ up close, before Louis’s laughing ( _sans_ humour) and stepping away.

“You’ve got a mouth on you, Curly. It’ll get you in trouble, if you don’t watch out.” Louis says breezily, like the whole encounter that just happened, didn’t. Perhaps this is what it feels like to get put on the Louis Tomlinson ‘List of People I Hate’.

Harry’s oddly alright with this. Angry sex is still a possibility.

“Why are you so fixated on my hair?” He asks, and Louis squints at him for a moment before turning on his heel and walking out the door.

Harry lets time wash over him for a while, the sounds from outside pouring in with the sunlight and the air, and he doesn’t think of anything at all. When he does stir himself, he looks at his classroom with the peeling blue paint and worn-down green carpet that’s now the scene of Where Louis Tomlinson Rejected Him.

“As first conversations go, that was pretty shit.” He says to the room at large.

There isn’t a reply, so he takes his irreparably broken heart and departs.

 


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's been reading this!! People have even been telling me to get a move on (although this is pretty late), and I'm so happy anyone is liking it.
> 
> Also, if there are any errors in the chapters, I actually like it when people tell me, or else I find them on my own and feel like an idiot.
> 
> I hope you like the chapter!

** Two: I hate the way you drive my car **

It’s a testament to how good a friend Zayn is that he absolutely does not mention the Louis/Dating disaster that was in the seven days that followed it. And that’s good, that’s a whole lot of good, because Harry isn’t sure he can even cope to think of that little scene without half of his body water pouring forth from his eyes.

Of course, once the seven days recovery period is over, Zayn doesn’t shut the fuck up. If Harry’s life hadn’t become even more worthy of a pulp romance novel than Zayn’s is, he’d take digs right back; now, though, he’s got to grin and bear it (which is not to be taken literally, because there is no grinning going on here).

“Zayn, which of these photos is the best, I can’t decide which one to put-”

“Sorry, I don’t talk to guys who got rejected by Louis Tomlinson.” Zayn replied blithely, and Harry thought about setting off the sprinkler Zayn was sitting right under and making sure Liam was around to see Zayn with his hair unstyled.  
He’s not that cruel, though (he’ll throw some of the school food at him instead).

*

Perhaps the English Lit class was a bad idea after all. As in, a hugely colossally terribly apocalyptically bad idea. A ninety four rank of a bad idea on a scale from one to ten.

Of course, the fact that Harry’s mind can’t actually decide whether it was a good or bad choice doesn’t really cement either opinion, but, at the moment, he’s swinging towards bad.

Louis, naturally, has taken to speaking up nearly every lesson to answer something, and Harry is so completely aware that this has nothing to do with him that he might’ve accidentally began thinking it was something to do with him, somewhere down the line.

“Does anyone know what this tells the reader?” Mr Harries’ll go, and Louis will have his hand up before Harry’s heart has yet got round to another pump. And then Louis will get to tell the class all about the joy and wonder of falling in love and how great it is, and Harry will resign himself to a life of sobbing over Louis and his six and five blue flecks, and when he leaves the class, he’ll tell himself again (firmly) that he’s going to get over Louis, starting from now.

In romance books, they always paint a picture or something to get over the person, if the whole angry-passionate-make out solution turns out to fail. Harry’s shit at art, though, so that option is out the window. He could ask Zayn to draw Louis from him, but even that joke isn’t worth the resultant years of taking the piss that will come from it.

“Can I borrow one of those?” He asks (hopefully he sounds casual and cool and totally just acting on a whim), nodding his head at Zayn’s bag, in which his hands are pawing to get at one of the books in there. If Zayn wasn’t so attached to the tea-stained pages, he could start a library from the collection in the bag alone.

“One of what?” Zayn replies absently, bringing out his hand clutching a thick paperback with creased pages. Knowing Zayn, there’s probably annotations along the side, linking the lives of the characters in to his own.

“The books.” Harry says, aiming for nonchalant and probably coming up somewhere between badly-acted disinterested and pathetically desperate.

“You want one of my books?” Zayn clarifies, and when Harry nods, he narrows his eyes at him like Harry’s just admitted to some heinous crime (which he has, but crimes to literature don’t count, apparently).

“Thought I might as well give it a try. You seem to be pretty in to them, all the time.”

“Harry, you said they were pretentious, near-blasphemous wastes of ink and a desecration to the dead bodies of the trees the words were printed on.”

“Yeah,” Harry replies, because he kind of did, “but I was thinking, you know, can’t judge without having read some.”

If possible, Zayn’s eyes narrow further until they’re just little slits of impossibly long eyelashes and a tiny glimpse of the eye between them. That could just be the eyelashes hiding them, though.

“What brought on this sudden change of heart?” He asks, and Harry’s heart (which is the one in question) slides down to somewhere around his shoes, and gives up the ghost. If he doesn’t watch out, all this stress will give him a glorious head full of grey hair. Frankly, he’d rather have white, because it would make a better fashion statement.

“Dunno. Just thinking.”

For a moment, Harry thinks he’s gotten away with it, but-

No.

As if luck would bless him enough for that. Zayn’s laughter is enough to draw in the stares of every- single- other- person- in- the- room, and Harry can’t put enough emphasis on how stares can _burn._

“Can you stop?” He asks, and the question teeters on the edge of becoming a plea, and he would be more concerned about that if he wasn’t, actually, desperate.

There’s a few small wheezes from Zayn, and this whole goofy laughter is belying the “attractive and mysterious badboy” veneer.  Harry hopes that Liam is watching (because Harry is the proud owner of a blackened and twisted heart).

“Thinking- ‘bout- the books,” Zayn says –between gasping laughter-, and okay, that wasn’t even funny, Harry’s going to push Zayn out of his chair in a second and hit him in the face with it.

Harry takes a leaf out of the soon to be released autobiography of Mr Harries (which will probably be called “I shouldn’t have become a teacher, someone pass the scotch”), folds his arms on the table, rests his head on them and sighs like he’s expelling from his body every breath his ever taken at once.

*

“I think this picture flawlessly captures the broken beauty of unrequited love,” Harry says, after snapping a picture (he can be crafty, if the situation so requires) of Zayn staring wistfully at the bookshelves to whence Liam just departed. Harry’s pretty sure that Zayn’s whole romance –or non romance, as it is- is nearly Shakespearean in nature. Of course, that means he could well die, but Harry could get a great book deal out of it.

“Why are you taking pictures of me?” Zayn asks wearily, and it’s a bad sign if Zayn’s given up on everything this early in the morning. They’ve only been here ten minutes, after all.

“Like I said, to flawlessly capture the brok-”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that,” Zayn breaks in, voice steamrollering over Harry’s own, and Harry is now one hundred percent sure that he’s using ‘the broken beauty of unrequited love’ as the caption for this photo. Even better, he can go into a deep analysis; the boy stares longingly to where his love has gone, and the futility of  the quiet fire he keeps inside himself weighs him down as he ponders whether his love shall ever be returned’. It’s a classic.

“It’s probably because you’re very photogenic.” Harry says comfortingly. “Do you know how hard it is to find people with camera-ready faces?”

“ _Probably?_ ” Zayn repeats, like Harry’s just downplayed the single most exciting event of the entirety of creation, and Harry nods slowly, like his head is too heavy to move.

“You’ve got a lovely face, Zayn. It’s a pity you’re running after the one guy who can’t appreciate that.” It’s easy enough for his limbs to move then, because the expression on Zayn’s face foretells death. Not that Zayn actually carries weapons around (besides lighters), but he could always crush Harry’s head with his heavy biker boots. Come to think of it, Harry’s pretty certain that Zayn only rides his motorbike to get Liam’s attention. Fucking Zayn, with his nearly three years crush that may or may not have developed into an obsession.

The air’s colder outside, and Harry almost wishes he’d stayed in the sixth form area with it’s near-broken heaters that creak with age, but then he thinks of Zayn and his sickening romance and yeah, he’d rather be out here.

He crosses to outside the library, because he does actually spend too much time out here for reasons he can’t actually understand himself. Maybe he should’ve worn a scarf. The wind tears at his skin, ripping through the fabric of his jumper like it’s not even there to slice him with tiny points, and he should’ve worn a scarf _and_ a jacket, and maybe a balaclava. He’s not even sure where you can get a balaclava.

“Who even wears a balaclava, anyway?” He asks the air, and his lips feel stiff from the air. It’s not supposed to get this cold this quickly, it’s outrageous, and should be made illegal. That’s going to be one of the first things he does, when ( _when_ ) he becomes the Mighty and Powerful Great Leader of the World, making days that are cold when they should not be cold, illegal.

“I don’t know. Never really seen anyone wearing one, have you?” Replies someone, and if Harry’s heart was in the region of his shoes, it’s now fallen out through the soles of the shoes and is drilling straight down through the crust of the earth. His heart is a miner, apparently.

“Not sure we’re really balaclava weather, most of the time.” Harry says, and he can hear Louis stepping nearer to him like a bird of prey. Not that Louis is a bird of prey. He’s much more attractive than that.

“Of course, they could be used for the greater good.” Muses Louis, and Harry isn’t sure whether it’s paralysing fear or paralysing cold that’s keeping him staring at a brick wall, but whichever it is, he thanks it. Conversations can run smoother when he’s not distracted by six and five or any other feature on Louis’s face, for that matter.

“The greater good?”

“Well, if we never saw anyone’s face,” Louis(‘s voice) begins, and it’s a lot too close for Harry to feel in any way comfortable or not turned on, “We’d only see people for their personalities. So, if you fell in love, it’d be for the person themselves, not for their face. And everyone’d be a lot happier, yeah?”

“That’s- that’s fucking beautiful.” Harry says, and Harry would like to say he could feel something in the air that told him Louis was smiling, or the deep connection between them allowed Louis’s laughter to seep through unheard to anyone else, but that’d be bullshit.

In reality, Harry just thinks about how even Louis’s voice and the words he says seem to be screwing Harry over, and he needs to get over this, or detach himself from the situation and callously get Louis to date him for his sisters’ sake (which is not happening, ever, because if he could detach that easily he’d be floating free from all this right now). It’s too cold in the air, like it’s turning to frost around him, and the blood in Harry’s veins is too hot, and he’s still motionless and he can no longer remember whether that’s a good or bad thing.

“I pride myself on my beautiful words, Curly.”

“Why does everyone laugh at my hair?” Harry asks, maybe to Louis or maybe to himself or maybe to no one at all, but Louis answers anyway.

“’Cause, Curly, you’ve got more hair then about three people put together. It’s _insane._ People aren’t supposed to have that much hair, they’re supposed to shave it off and make wigs or stuff cushions or something.”

Harry’s struck by an awful vision in which every single cushion in his house is filled with his hair, and every time he goes near one they call out to him like little off-shoots of himself. It’s horrifying.

“I don’t think people make cushions with hair.” He points and, and Louis hums like he’s willing to think about that point. For someone who’s obviously got some intelligence, Louis has some fucking weird ideas.

“But think how economical it would be. Need another cushion? Fine, and have a haircut too!”

“You’d need a lot of hair to fill one cushion.” Harry says, and when Louis next speaks, he’s got close enough to pull on some of the strands of Harry’s hair, just enough for it to tug at his scalp.

“Lucky you have so much, then.” He says, and it’s so quiet that Harry would’ve barely noticed him if his entire body wasn’t of hyper alert, and then there’s footsteps fading away.

“Well, fuck.” Harry remarks to the wall, and this time there’s no answer.

He probably needs a good sit down, a cup of tea with a dash or five of vodka, and a lot of time to think over that entire encounter and decide whether any of it classifies under flirting. Decisions, Harry can do (flirting, he cannot) (also, he can neither do Louis Tomlinson, but that is not of his design).

*

It’s been ten days since she first asked him for Lottie to come back and find Harry. Her nail polish is now violet, and it isn’t chipped yet, so it must be new on.

“I came to see how the plan was going along.” She whispers covertly, like her paying him to date her brother (without knowing he was – _is,_ says a small and traitorous voice in his head that sounds a hell of a lot like Zayn- maybe in love with him for the better part of a year) is some top secret mission.

“I’ve killed all the spies.” He whispers back, for the joy of seeing her eyes widen in horror, before they narrow again. Obviously Harry’s humour has to be around a person for a long time before they understand that it’s not a personal thing, he’s actually that stupid. Most of the time.

“I’m trying to be serious.” Lottie says, sighing, because does she ever stop, and looking around the room like there has never been a more interesting room, ever. There’s the standard green carpet that schools seem to specialise in buying from somewhere that sells hideous, wiry carpet (not that Harry’s stroked the carpet) (well, he has, but only the once) in even more hideous shades, and the walls are a paler shade of green. It’s like living inside a lime, but with computers and desks and almost post pubescent humans.

“So was I.” Harry replies, and the wash of fear over her face makes it worth his while.

“You have a fucked up sense of humour,” She says, and Harry would remind her about language, or something, but she’s way too old for that particular lecture. Besides, her parents seem like the types who would’ve been squawking ‘no foul language!’ from the time she could walk.

“I’ve been told.”

“So, how’s it coming along?” She persists, and Harry purses his lips. He should probably try and come up with a way to make ‘complete and utter failure’ sound less like ‘complete and utter failure’, but his mind is scratching at the edges and finding nothing.

“Uh,” He says, and her stare is almost intensely feral. Young girls (or boys, or any young thing) are not supposed to look feral. “We’ve had a couple of conversations.”

“Yeah?” Lottie says, raising her eyebrows like she expects further detail. Perhaps he should go into clarity into how Louis and he made sweet love, or something, just for kicks.

Although, scarring someone for life is probably even a stretch for his humour to cover.

“Wherein, I asked him out the first time, and he refused, and we argued because I accidentally called him a prick, and I thought that was that, but then we had a conversation outside the library about balaclavas and love and my hair, so I am feeling distinctly more hopeful.” Harry lets out a rush of breath at the end of the sentence, because that’s a lot to say all at once and he feels like his lungs are collapsing in on themselves, or maybe combusting, but Lottie doesn’t look very pleased.

In fact, the feral has fully emerged and she is now less human, more wild animal.

“You’ve had _two conversations?_ In _ten days?_ ”

Some people have to be overly fond of italics. Without them, the world would not be as emphasized.

“Do you know how hard he is to find? Seriously, I don’t even know where he goes, and I’ve- I’ve not been looking for him for ages, _but-_ ”

“I paid you fifty pounds to go on one date, do you know how much money that is, I could’ve bought a serious amount of-”

“Grapefruits.” Harry interjects, because this conversation is beginning to run on them simply interrupting each other, and it’s infuriating, like an itch that’s under your skin that can’t be scratched, just teasing under the surface.

“What?” Lottie asks, as though Harry has never talked so much shit in his life. It could be true, but she’s have to ask Zayn for some of his finer moments. For example, the time that he tried to flirt with the undeniably nine out of ten cashier at Asda by attempting to engage him in a scientific discussion about wheat, and crops, and crop circles, and that somehow degenerated into Harry babbling about the possibility about life on other planets, and whether it was more terrifying to think that we were alone, or that there was something else out there. Really, it’s a wonder that Nine didn’t call the police on them, or a psych team.

“You could buy a lot of grapefruit for fifty pounds.” Harry elaborates. He could do with a swivel, there, for dramatic effect. That’s one of the reasons why there should be swivel instead of ordinary chairs in the sixth form area. Who wants a fixed chair, anyway?

“Why grapefruit?” Lottie asks, and Harry applauds her dedication to not walking out on him.

“I like grapefruit the most. Out of fruits. My favourite vegetable would have to be courgette. Great word, courgette.”

“I think I need to go now.” Lottie says slowly, and Harry nods, watching her get up from where she’d sat herself on the desk and leave,  feet nearly tripping over each other in her desire to leave.

Still, if Harry learnt anything from that conversation, aside from how Lottie obviously doesn’t feel the same about the word courgette as he does, is that he needs to redouble his efforts to get Louis Tomlinson’s attention, if not for his own poor heart, then for the beautiful young love Lottie is part of.

And for that, he needs the advice of someone who inhales romance on the daily (it stings like defeat, but his pride is the last thing he should be worrying about right now) (shitty novels always say that your heart is more important).

*

“You want me to what?” Asks Zayn blankly, and Harry props his head up with his hand, index, middle and ring fingers by his temple, little finger curled against his cheek and the thumb propped up under his chin. He’s seen Louis do the position countless times, and it always comes off somehow endearing and thoughtful, so he thought he’d give it a shot.

“To help me win over the heart of Louis Tomlinson.” Harry repeats, and Zayn nods vaguely, like Harry just confirmed his worst fear.

“I thought that’s what you said, but, you know, I had hopes that I imagined it. Small, secret, hopes, but they were there.” From the tone of Zayn’s voice, Harry can equate this depression to that of when Bubbles, Zayn’s fish, had died, and Zayn has insisted that Bubbles would be given an honourable funeral, where he, Harry, and Zayn’s family squeezed into the bathroom to watch Bubbles take the long journey down to the sewer. Zayn had cried, and Harry had spoken about what a lively fish Bubbles was (he sat inside a little plastic castle all day; his death was one of the few occasions that Harry had actually seen him), and it had been a woeful day for everyone concerned. What was worse what that Zayn’s mum had, unfortunately, bought cod and chips for dinner before Bubbles’s untimely end, and when Zayn sat down and saw what was on his plate, he burst in to tears and Harry had let him cry on his shoulder. He said, afterwards, it was like showering with his clothes on.

“You’ll need a benediction from God himself.” Zayn says, and Harry thinks this just about figures. Trust him to chase the only guy in the school who seems to avoid everyone else in the school.

“Anything of a faster solution?” He tries, and Zayn groans. Really, his problem isn’t that bad. He must’ve had a fateful run in with Liam today for his mood to be this downbeat.

“Have you tried talking to him?” Zayn asks, and Harry closes his eyes briefly. He’s (foolishly) told Zayn the entirety of both of his run ins with Louis already, so he doesn’t know what the exact point of that question was.

“You know the answer to that.”

“Too right I do. You barely know him, he barely knows you. Why don’t you go do something he likes, find out his interests or something, and then you’ll have something to talk about that isn’t hair filled cushions.”

“You know what Zayn?” Harry says, with wide eyes and his mouth falling open, “That’s not a half bad idea.”

“What d’you think I read these for?” Zayn replies, going back to where he’d left his book, and Harry is finding himself with a new found and deep respect for the lengths his best mate will go to to find ways to attract the poster boy of wholesome good looks and obliviousness.

*

Finding out about the interests of Louis Tomlinson is impossible. Not the over-exaggerated, ‘my homework is impossible!’ type of impossible, but the unfeasible, never going to happen type of impossible.

As far as Harry can see, Louis Tomlinson does not have any hobbies, or likes, or even dislikes, because he doesn’t tell them to anyone, and if there’s no one to ask, he’s stuck in a terrible loop of questioning his life decisions that brought him here.

He resolves to talk to Louis himself, because he’s got a lesson the next day, and who better to ask than the man himself? Although, Louis doesn’t appear to be in the most talkative of moods. Which, you know, means he isn’t talking (and that means at fucking all, and just because Harry thinks Louis may or may not bathe in golden, holy light, doesn’t mean he’s not scared shitless of him).

“So, does anyone think they know what kind of image Copeland is trying to create?”

Even though Harry knows the use of the word ‘harbor’ is meant to be seen as a verb, he can’t help but picture merry blue waves (and no such waves exist in England, there’s probably laws against it, they must must must be grey green, slamming into the rocks of the harbour walls and tearing it apart- perhaps he’s not such a shitty poet, after all)).

On his part, Mr Harries is looking hopefully at Louis, who in turn has his head pillowed on his arms –that are lying flat on the desk- and is, to all appearances, asleep. Harry hopes it’s appearances only, because a freshly-woken Louis is even less likely to want to talk than a usual Louis. Who is, of course, by no means a usual sort of person, so any rules could apply.

“At the start- the pulses gulp in rhyme. What does that mean?”

Fuck Harry, if he knows. How can a pulse gulp in rhyme, pulses don’t _rhyme._ Anyway, there’s only thirteen bloody words in this poem, where are the lovely sonnets he spent most of his early literature lessons gazing at?  
Also, how can bodies siphon and harbour? (Come to think of it, Harry’s not very sure he can recall the correct definition of siphon, and he’s going to have to look that up later, or it’ll annoy him like a needle in his brain).

Mr Harries gives a deep sigh, looking at the sheet of paper with it’s thirteen printed words down the middle. Perhaps, Harry thinks, he should’ve taken up something more fulfilling in life than teaching. Something like midwifery; those kind of jobs are supposed to let you ‘witness the most beautiful moments life can offer’, or bullshit like that.

“Our pulses- gulp- in rhyme- upon- release- our,” Mr Harries begins reciting, and Harry’s read this poem already, he doesn’t need to hear it again, and he can’t remember the definition for the _life_ of him. “bodies beyond- us- siphon, harbor.”

Yeah, Harry still has no idea what Copeland’s trying to say, but it’s relaxing. In a way, it feels exquisitely intimate; whoever’s pulses are gulping in rhyme, they’re close, close enough for them to feel each other’s hearts beating, close enough together that she feels separate from her body. Maybe he understands it a little, then.

(When Harry takes the thick, blue covered Oxford Dictionary off the shelf later in the lesson, he finds out that the verb ‘siphon’ means “Draw off or convey liquid by means of a siphon”. And the verb of the word ‘harbor’, he knows, is to keep something close to yourself, so- they take something from each other, and keep it close. He guesses that means their love).

Once the bell has rung for the end of the lesson, Louis stands up from his chair, pulling his bag up with him, like he’d been counting down the seconds for that all along. He probably had. Taking the briefest (okay, it might be at least four seconds) moment to stare at how (scandalously) tight Louis’s t-shirt is, he moves himself into Louis’s path and effectively blocks his way out of the classroom. Waiting until he’s sure that everyone has left the room –except Mr Harries, but he’s going deaf, so Harry’s not going to count him right now- to talk, he watches the way that Louis’s face keeps flickering between amused and mildly homicidal. He hopes, fervently, his well-practiced charm will keep it on the former.

“Balaclava.” He says, once the last girl has walked out the door, and immediately feels like using his hands to dig a hole through the floor of the room and never coming out of said hole. “I mean, uh. Banana.”

“Balaclava banana?” Louis asks sceptically, and Harry nods quickly, like he meant to say that all along, although it’s pretty fucking clear that Louis doesn’t believe a single word he’s saying. The paint on the walls is still peeling, and the laminated posters are still falling off from where their staples have been prised out by kids with nothing better to do, and Louis is still sinfully beautiful.

“Can bananas wear balaclavas?” Harry presses, because he’s got himself into this mess and he might as well see it through to the sorry end, and Louis squints at him like Harry’s head has sprouted a good few more arms.

“I don’t really think they need to, Curly. What with the protective banana skin, and all.”

Well, yeah, maybe. It’s Louis’s fault for distracting him from the very important mission of making Louis want in his pants. Or, more romantically, to confess his undying love for Harry, despite the utter shit that finds it’s way into the world through the means of his mouth.

“But _can they?_ ” He so, so needs to stop talking. Maybe there’s therapy courses available for people who never stop talking crap around the object of their lovelorn affections.

“Depends on the size of the balaclava, I suppose.” Harry will concede that point, because it happens to be true, but there’s no way he’s backing down next time. (Somehow, he feels like he’s always letting Louis Tomlinson win arguments, and there’s no doubt in his mind that it’s because Louis’s eyes are sharp and his cheekbones sharper yet).

“I suppose so.” He agrees. (‘Please let me sweep you off your feet and carry you into the sunset’ he wants to say, but doesn’t, ‘cause that gives new rise to all sorts of shame).

“Was there a reason you’re standing like an obscenely tall and bouffant haired roadblock in my path?” Louis asks, once the pause has stretched on for a good deal longer than a pause should.

“My hair is not _bouffant_ ,” Harry says, tongue stumbling over the word, “And yes.” Mostly, he’s trying to force his cheeks not to flush, because Louis’s use of the word obscene is obscene, and if Harry wasn’t infatuated he’d despise him. There could be a bit of both going on, really.

“And what would that be, Curly?”

Harry thinks the him versus cheeks battle is one he’s definitely going to lose, but he can’t go down without a valiant fight.

“Well, I wanted to know. Like, uh, if you wanted to hang out. With me.” _‘Harry’s a very charming boy. He’s very polite and articulate in lessons’._ Harry’s teachers are all conspiring against him so that all his life, he’s thought that he’s actually been those things, when really, he can’t ask someone if they want to “hang out” without his cheeks burning up enough to fry six eggs (one at a time, too).

“You’re _blushing._ ” Louis points out, as though Harry didn’t already know. The flush seems to have addled his ‘little grey cells’, too, because he can’t even work out if Louis’s tone is detached or mocking or (God forbid) _fond._

“Don’t- don’t even start. I don’t have any control over my bodily functions?”

“Really?”

That therapy appointment he was thinking about; he so needs to book an appointment. Within the next five minutes, if possible. And then never leave the therapists room for the rest of his long and miserable life, in case he has the piss poor luck to run in to Louis Tomlinson and feel the shame of this encounter spread right through him like cyanide in his body.

“Don’t listen to anything I’m saying.” Harry advises, and Louis pulls his bottom lip into his mouth with small teeth, and it’s so distracting Harry could _cry._ Who even knew that was supposed to be a turn on?

What if he’s not even good for other people anymore? What if he’s only ever going to be ‘Louis-sexual’ from this point onwards?

“Where was I?” He asks bewilderedly, and a pink tongue comes up to wet Louis’s top lip and Harry is not going to look at that. He needs to concentrate.

Six and five, think about that. Six and five.

“Hanging out.” Louis replies promptly, and oh yeah. Back to his failures at even talking to people.

“Exactly. I was wondering if you wanted to hang out.” For all the world, Louis looks as though Harry’s something extraordinary that’s escaped out of a top secret holding facility. Or maybe a far away island, where guys with no brain to mouth filter are bred for their powers of honesty and lack of charisma.

“Hang out.” Louis clarifies, and Harry nods.

“Well, we talk a bit,” (Louis raises his eyebrows, and Harry’s mouth spews out more words before Louis sees fit to right the wrongs in that sentence), “And I realised a barely know you, so I thought, why not try and talk to you more? I don’t even know where you _are_ when you’re not in lessons.” He emphasises.

Louis doesn’t look all that convinced. One of the posters behind him is threatening to pull free of it’s holdings and float down on to Louis’s head. There’s a line of black ink, only half a centimetre long, on the skin just under Louis’s right eyebrow. Pen marks aren’t supposed to be beautiful, but hey, Harry thinks, he’s already Louis-sexual anyway, so maybe everything Louis is beautiful.

“Is this so you can find other ways to ask me out?” Louis queries, and well, shit.

“Perhaps,” Harry hedges, and the corners of Louis’s mouth twitch, like a small glitch on screen that’s only there for the tiniest fraction of a second. Personally, Harry thinks Louis should’ve let himself smile, because it would’ve really helped relieve Harry about the impending axe over his neck that is ‘Will Louis tell me straight up that he isn’t interested?’.

“Is this going to be a recurring thing?” Louis says, and Harry drags his teeth over his lower lip. He’d sort of planned that his spontaneity would be endearing enough for Louis to accept, and failing that- he was just going to keep asking until Louis wore down. Not exactly Shakespearean romance, but it got him to the same place.

“Depends how long it takes you to say yes.” Harry replies, and for a single, fleeting moment, he thinks that Louis’s going to accept. He even opens his mouth, for God’s sake, and Harry’s so fucking sure that Louis’s going to say it that the let down is like a bucket of freezing water (like liquid needles that somehow still prick him) over his head, seeping through his clothes and into his bones.

“It’s still a no, Curly. Like I said, you’re not my type.”

“Can’t we just hang out? You can meet Zayn, he’s a great guy for someone with a Twilight desktop background, I told him it’s shit but he won’t listen- seriously, I’ll drop the dating thing, it’s probably weird by now, I’ve made it weird; is it weird?” Harry says, the words falling out of his mouth too fast for him mind to understand anything he says.

“Yeah, it’s weird. And if it wasn’t before, it definitely is now.” Louis reaffirms, and Harry goes back to thinking about digging the hole, and maybe asking Louis to bury him in it once the hole is complete. Which would make it less of a hole and more of a grave, but- whatever.

“So it’s a definite no on the dating thing?” Harry says, mouth pulling taut, and Louis taps his chest lightly with one hand, right over where his heart (harbours love) is.

“Perhaps.” Louis replies, edging around Harry and walking out without another look back.

“A perhaps is better than a no. Much better than a no.” Harry announces to the empty room (with a Mr Harries, who’s been reading his Teaching for Dummies book again and eating an apple).

He rubs the fabric of his shirt where Louis tapped it, feeling his heartbeat underneath it. _‘Our pulses gulp in rhyme’._ And suddenly, it’s not so hard to understand anymore, not with his heart stuttering under the pressure of siphoning and harbouring and a _perhaps._

Harry stands in the nearly-empty classroom, and his pulse gulps in rhyme (and that rhyme is perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps) (which is shitty poetry, but it’s heartfelt) (and it can be read in iambic pentameter).

*

“So, how did the master plan of Talking To Louis Tomlinson go?” Zayn asks, and Harry peers at the clock behind Zayn’s head. In fact, if anyone has bouffant hair, it’s Zayn.

“I can practically see the capital letters when you say that, mate.” He informs Zayn, looking inside his bag and trying to locate the lunch he knows he put in here earlier, he _knows_  he did, because lunch is one of, if not the most important part of the school day.

“You’re fifteen minutes late.” Zayn informs him back (this will turn into a war of information, if they don’t watch out). Harry has located the missing lunch.

“I know. I saw the clock when I came in.”

“You going to tell me why?” Zayn asks, breaking the current status quo of statement followed by statement. His eyes are wide, and Harry has that small half-second where he can’t differentiate between Zayn’s pupil and his iris, which- it’s not that hard, seeing as how his pupil is black and his iris liquid brown, but Harry struggles anyway.

“Siphon, harbor.” Harry replies serenely, unwrapping his sandwich with undisguised hunger.

“Is that a poem?” Asks Zayn, and Harry nods, swallowing the bite of his sandwich before replying.

“By a woman who understands much about love.”

Zayn doesn’t look like he understands a single bloody thing Harry is saying, and Harry’s pretty pleased with that.

*

Sometimes, Harry feels like he’s the only person in this school who can drive, but chooses not to. And for the first time, his streak of walking both to and from school is going to be marred, and it’s Louis’s fault (because it’s always Louis’s fault, and even when it isn’t, Harry can find a way to blame him).

“Cur-ly.” Louis slurs, leaning up against the rear of a small, black Ford Fiesta that looks like it might’ve done battle in the first word war. It’s probably one of those cute cars that their owners have a name for. The passenger side door is open, and Harry isn’t sure why the _passenger_ one is open in lieu of the _driver’s,_ but he’s not going to ask.

“Are you drunk?” Harry can guess the answer to this already, because there’s a near-empty bottle of whiskey in Louis’s hand. The only small salvation Harry can think of for this situation is that Louis might not’ve drunk it all in one sitting (his throat should’ve burned off, surely, if he’d done that).

“No- ‘m a little tipsy.” To emphasise his point, Louis tries to take a step towards Harry, and Harry reaches his hands out reflexively to stop Louis (and the bottle of highly smashable glass) falling on the concrete.

“My hero.” Louis declares, placing one hand over his heart (it’s on the wrong side of his chest, but Harry can understand the sentiment).

“Did you drive here?” Harry asks, sighing because the situation calls for an adult, ‘I am very disappointed in you and your life choices as a whole’ sigh.

“Yeah. ‘S my car.” Louis says, nodding towards Little Black Ford behind him, and it’s only a fear of turning out like Lottie or Mr Harries that stops him sighing again. “He’s called Pippa.”

“He?” Harry questions, and there’s no reply from Louis except a raised eyebrow (and he shouldn’t be able to look so focused and threatening when he’s that inebriated).

“Alright, get in the passenger side, I’ll drive you back.”

“You don’t drive, Curly. I’ve- seen you walking home.” Strangely, the only thing Harry can seem to notice is that Louis’s voice is lower and huskier when he’s drunk, and he doesn’t want any part of how this is affecting him.

“Mate, you’re so pissed you probably couldn’t even get the key in the ignition.” Harry says, and Louis makes a noise in his throat that maybe started out life as a snort and ended up suspiciously like he’s trying to send up all his internal organs.

“You’re- ah. You’rrrrre-” Okay, Harry notes, there’s no need for the ‘r’ sound to carry on that long, not even drunk people talk like that, “Takin’ the lib-ty.” For someone who sounds like he might cry alcohol, Louis sounds really, _really_ self-satisfied. Smug prick.

Harry’s screwed.

“Do you mean liberty?”

“Yeah.” Louis replies, waving the bottle in his hand so it comes perilously close to shattering over Harry’s head and probably causing him severe damage (to his chances of getting laid) (which means by Louis, because he is now Louis-sexual, and cannot perform coitus with anyone who is not Louis Tomlinson). “You, Cur-leee, are taking, the lib-ty.”

“Get in the fucking car.” Harry sighs, and for lack of a better option –and mostly because Louis is trying to sit on the back of the car-, reaches forward and picks Louis up, trying to hold onto a sudden load of flailing limbs that move too quickly for someone who’s blood is now more alcohol that actual blood.

Which, coincidentally, Harry could tell you the different parts of.

“You are sli- slight’n m’honour,” Louis declares, once Harry’s pushed him well enough into the car that he can fasten the seatbelt. And because Louis clutches on to it like there’s nothing more precious to him in the world (and he’s got some unprisable (that’s not a word, but he can make some up, Shakespeare did it) fingers), the bottle has to be buckled in with him, golden-brown liquid pooling and sloshing at the bottom.

“Do you ever shut up?” Harry asks conversationally, and Louis hums as Harry walks around to the driver’s side, pondering the question. The driver’s side, however, is locked, the door refusing to pull open when Harry tugs repeatedly at the handle Through the window, he can see the keys hanging in the ignition, the metal glinting in the autumn sunlight, and Harry has never felt less like poetic descriptions than he does now.

“I locked that door from the inside.” Louis says, and Harry groans (sighing again would seem repetitive, and no matter how smashed Louis is, Harry still wants some of that).

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Harry replies, ducking down so he’s at eye level with him. Louis, however, seems fucking unperturbed, lifting up the bottle in an imaginary toast before drinking. “Alright, I’m coming across, but I warned you.”

Lifting up a leg so he can place his foot on the edge of Louis’s seat, Harry tries to lever himself forward, one hand still clutching at the roof of the car, and Louis is humming the tune to ‘A Pirate’s Life For Me’.

“Isn’t that song for rum?” Harry asks, voice straining with trying to reach his other leg across to the driver’s seat.

“Pirates- c’n drink- what- they- want,” Louis says, voice catching on the rough sounds. Harry tries to think of anything other than how his crotch is directly over Louis’s, and in doing so, only thinks about it more.

“This is kind of homo erotic, isn’t it?” Louis remarks suddenly, like he’s talking about the weather or the fifty brands of tea you can get down at Tesco’s, and there, there it is. Harry’s body, mutinous traitor that it is, has a flush creeping up into his cheeks, and how Louis’s slur has disappeared without a trace should be a cause for concern but it really, really, isn’t.  
Also, Louis’s voice un-slurred, mouth and tongue forming words that shouldn’t be said when Harry’s balanced over him, and Harry reaches his leg across to the other side of Louis’s seat, and to the untrained eye, it would look exactly as though he’s straddling him.  
Of course, that’s exactly what it is, but Harry doesn’t care.

“You’re really taking the liberty now.” Louis informs him, and Harry brings his hand down, glacially slow, to pull the car door shut. At some point, Louis’s pupils widened and they blocked out most of the iris.

“Six and five.” Harry says, before lowering himself on to Louis’s lap and grinding down. Louis’s eyelids, which had been drooping ( _Sleepy drunk,_ Harry notes, because even in the middle of grinding he has time to take mildly unnecessary and creepy pieces of information and store them), fly open, and his mouth opens slightly, just enough for it to part and a rush of air to come out.

“Shit, Curly,” Louis breathes out, the hand not clasping the whiskey coming up to tug at Harry’s hair, knotting his index finger and wrapping strands of hair around it. Harry keeps moving, pushing his hips forward so his arse drags across the fabric of Louis’s crotch, and Harry can _feel_ how hard he is when he moves, the bump of Louis’s erection pushing against him, and it’s almost fucking so-

Yeah, Harry _nearly_ got in Louis’s pants. Except, he’s kind of _on_ Louis’s pants, instead.

“Is this what you wanted, Louis?” Harry murmurs, leaning forward so his mouth is by the shell of Louis’s ear, and Louis makes a different noise from earlier, a cross between an exhale and a whine. “Waited for me to come out?”

“Perhaps.” Louis says, and his voice is still fine (a little hoarse from the alcohol, but fine), and Harry honestly can’t believe his nerve. Some people obviously have no idea of the effect single words can have, when used in the right context. He moves so  that his mouth is directly by Louis’s ear, breathing deeply, before pressing a kiss to the lobe and then sucking softly, letting the quiet noises Louis makes wash over him and into his ears.

“Perhaps.” He agrees, pulling back. “I’ve wanted you to fuck me for so long.” Harry adds in blithely, and Louis shudders, eyes snapping shut so his eyelashes fan out over his cheeks like smudges, and Harry has waited for this a long, fucking time.

Harry thinks of Louis, and all the times he’s thought of him before, and all the times he’s heard seen watched him, and his vision goes black like a sky and white spots erupt over his vision like blurred stars and fused circuits, and Harry’s come in his pants like a teenager (which he is, but he thought he was over this stage).

The drive itself is quiet, because Louis finished the rest of the alcohol before they’d even left the car park, and Harry needed to think over whether what he just did was the strike of genius or the move of a very frustrated, very stupid boy.

It could always be both.

They only speak when Harry needs to ask directions (he’s creepy, not a stalker), and Harry could slap himself. That’s what he gets, he supposes, for fucking everything up by thinking with his dick. The car is smooth beneath his control, not like he expected it –he, or Pippa, as he is called- to drive.

“How ar’you go-in’ to get home?” Louis asks, once Harry’s pulled up into Louis’s driveway (note to self: he lives in a two story, detached suburban house with a neat front garden and white curtains in the kitchen), and Harry shrugs, pulling the keys out of the ignition and handing them to Louis before clambering out the car himself. His boxers are sticky and beginning to dry and it’s _awful,_ but it was Louis too, so Harry doesn’t really give two flying, multi colour fucks.

“I know the area. It won’t take me too long.”

Harry’s got to the end of the driveway before Louis speaks again, and when Harry turns to look, Louis’s by an oak wood front door with the number ‘22’ painted white on a black sign next to it.

“Curly?”

“Louis,” Harry draws out saying Louis’s name, wanting to speak slower than usual just to say it longer because it’s like caramel on his tongue, sweet and thick and Harry, if he had to say one thing forever, he’d say Louis’s name.

“’m drinking m’self blind ‘nd then we c’n both pretend this ne-ver happened.” Louis says, and Harry feels like all the blood in his body has been siphoned away (ha fucking ha).

“You do that.” He says, and Louis nods, slipping through the doorway and closing it behind him. Harry watches an unmoving door for a good deal longer than he should, because he’s incorrigibly pathetic, before making the walk home.

It takes him half an hour, in the end. But that could always be because he got lost twice.


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I'm so sorry it took this long... I had a load of exams last week and I forgot to write anything at all- and to top that off, I had serious writers block straight after that.
> 
> Finally written the chapter, though!
> 
> As usual, any comments/kudos/pointing out the mistakes I make in my sleep deprived mind are so welcome you cannot conceive :)

** Three: I hate it when you stare **

“Harry, you’ve got the Face of Tragic Doom on.” Zayn politely informs him the next morning, and Harry’d give him some snarky comment back (because really, who gives names to expressions) (especially ones called the ‘Face of Tragic Doom’), but he’s never felt more tragically doomed in his entire life.

“I’m a screw up,” He says despondently, and wishes for a lovely glass of red wine to sip from- for effect, naturally, but also maybe a tiny bit because perhaps if he got completely pissed, he could wipe his memory. Not just this morning or last night, but all of it. He could be _reborn_. “All I do is fuck things up and accidentally grind on hot boys in cars and _fuck._ ”

“You shagged him?” Zayn asks, and Harry looks into the bottom of his imaginary wine glass like it might hold some answers.

“No, Zayn,” Harry says, trying to sound all-patient and benevolent and shit, but he thinks he sounds like a snide bastard. So, all in all, he can’t act, he no longer can clutch on to the ghost of a shred of dignity, and he may still be pining over Louis Tomlinson. “Besides, if there _were_ any shagging going on –theoretically, you know- I would definitely be on bottom.”

Zayn looks sort of sea sick, and Harry can’t even get a hit of pleasure from that.

“But I definitely grinded on him. When he was off his head drunk. In his car, in our beautiful and almost empty school car park.”

“You’re so full of shit.” Zayn says, but he says it like there’s some unwilling admiration going on inside that smoky brain of his. Which, as Harry comes to think of it, is probably a bad omen, because Zayn’s got such a warped sense of what is and isn’t socially acceptable that Harry sometimes can tell if he’s in deep by Zayn’s reactions (“Well done!” “Oh crap.”). So, yeah, grinding on Louis in his car; not a good move (not that he needed Zayn Malik to tell him that, he was good without his opinion).

“I need to get wonderfully drunk.” Harry pronounces, staring around the room like a winged bottle of vodka might just fly out from under a desk and float down into his lap. The harder he stares, the more unlikely the idea seems. “But no alcohol is forthcoming.”

“Can I ask how you went from leaving school to grinding on the one and only love in your life?”

“You hurt me, Zayn. I though you loved me.” Harry says lightly, and wonders about whether asking Zayn if he could borrow one of his books is worth the trouble it’ll bring him. Perhaps he could steal one instead, which would save his unspoiled public face and set him on the winding path of a criminal life. What a bonus.

“I only keep you around ‘cause you’re helpful for homework.” Zayn replies, and Harry can feel his brow furrowing before he registers needing to make the expression.

“Zayn, we don’t even take the same subjects. Not even English Lit, though God knows you spend enough time reading for that to be worthwhile.”

“I didn’t take it because, as you love to tell me, the stuff I read isn’t great literature. And, yeah, you’re right. Fuck off, then.”

If there is one thing Harry is good at, it’s creating a conversation diversion.

“Don’t think you’re getting off the topic, Harry. I want the gruesome details of your grinding fiasco extravaganza.”

“You can’t have a fiasco and an extravaganza at the same time,” Harry points out, mumbling, but Zayn disregards this with a wave of his hand. Harry begins to question whether, if he looks at the paint of the wall for long enough, the explosion of green all around him will eventually blind him, or something. The lime description still stands, but if he’d been inside a slice of acidic fruit for that long, he might be dead (how the fuck would he know, he didn’t take science, science is for the Cambridge or Oxford bound, with doctorates glittering in the future, and Harry’s lucky enough if he can make it out of a single week  without messing up).

“Not the point. Details of the grinding. _Now._ ” For an extraordinarily hot guy with an extraordinarily bad taste in novels, you’d have thought Zayn would’ve known how a little bump and grind goes for himself, but maybe not. After all, Harry reasons, you can’t be staring longingly at Liam Payne’s back muscles in PE for most of your school life without losing your touch with everyone else.

“Like I said, he was drunk, and he called me over, and I offered to drive him home. So, I, uh, shoved him in the passenger seat, and the driver’s side was locked, so I had to, you know, climb over him. And he was in his seat, so. I was trying to get over, and yeah. There was grinding.”

Harry should become a politician, or something. That kind of charisma deserves to be seen by the masses.

 “And yeah, there was grinding.” Zayn repeats dubiously, one finger slid in the pages of his book. His ‘deep’, ‘thoughtful’ and ‘soulful’ eyes are looking deeply, thoughtfully and soulfully at Harry, his eyelashes only serving to make his eyes look bigger (like a human kind of Bambi) and Harry hates him. He definitely hates him. In fact, Harry’s going to bring in coffee tomorrow, because it’s a Friday, and Zayn always wears this tight as fuck white t-shirt and his biker jacket -you know, for the bike he doesn’t own-, and Harry’s going to pour it over him, and then Zayn won’t be able to do his weekly ‘try and get Liam to stare at my abdomen’.

“What do you want me to say?” Harry says, nettled and sort of worried that a furious Louis Tomlinson will break in at any second and shout at Harry for divulging the news of what really went on in the car. “I sat on his lap and rubbed a lot and-”

“Yeah, yeah, not that much detail, mate.” Zayn interrupts, and he’s back to looking sea sick. Wonderful.

“You asked.” Harry says, because Zayn did, and because Zayn looks like he’s trying every method known to man to forget what he just saw. “And for the record, it was great.”

Zayn blanches like there’s no blood left in his entire body.

*

There’s a run of good luck after that, in which Harry manages to not see Louis Tomlinson for a whole six days (that two of them are the weekend is irrelevant), because Louis is sick when they have their English Lit, and if Harry was so not pining, he’d say he’d noticed Louis’s absence like a spiked club had just been twisted in his gut. But he isn’t pining, so that doesn’t matter (but he probably is).

Good luck, though, doesn’t last forever. Their next meeting isn’t at their shared lesson, for once, but when Harry’s back to skulking around the library for lack of anything better to do other than watch Zayn’s painful attempts at trying to get Liam to notice him.

“Louis!” He calls out, spotting Louis’s figure walk past a few feet in front of him, a black beanie pulled down over his head, and he’s wearing _the_ jumper, the one that’s white and soft and looks like it had been crafted by the Gods themselves to cling softly around Louis’s body.

The person in the distance stills ever so slightly, looks in his direction, and begins walking on. Harry thinks about Lottie, and her persuasive bordering on threatening pleas; he visualises the notes, stuffed somewhere out of sight, and his heart burns and twists. He can’t be guilty, though, because he hasn’t done anything. (Well, except not tell Louis that his sister paid him to try and get Louis to date him, but that’s more of an omission of a fact than a straight out lie).

“Louis!” Harry says again, jogging to catch up with him, and Louis stops for real this time, his feet stilling movement, and Louis turns to face him. _Scratch the earlier comment,_ Harry thinks quietly, _it’s Louis that’s been crafted by the Gods._

Sometimes, Harry reflects on the fact that he’s in so deep, and then he either wants to break something or eat a lot of ice cream. Of course, he could always do both.

“Uh, hi.” He says, and Louis just stares, like he’s never met Harry before and he has absolutely no idea as to why Harry is talking to him out of the blue.

“Hello,” Louis replies after a pause in which Harry racked his brains for something intelligent to say and didn’t make him sound like a coconut dropped on his head when he was young.

“Did you know that more people, on average, are killed by falling coconuts than shark attacks?” Harry asks, and Louis squints like Harry’s burning too bright to look at full on (like a star, flaring up with heat and light millions of miles away).

“How are you even-” Louis begins, before disregarding that sentence and moving on. “I thought I told you I was pretending the – _incident_ didn’t happen?” Only Louis, Harry decides, would call getting an-almost lapdance in their car and incident, like he’s rattling this off from a police report.

“Yeah, but we were talking before that. Balaclavas, you know?” There’s no reply again from Louis. If it wasn’t skin raising-ly cold, Harry would sweat in nerves, because whenever Louis looks at him like that, Harry feels like he’s sitting a test and he doesn’t know the criteria (or even the subject). “And, uh, I wanted to say. Sorry, yeah? I didn’t mean for the whole, uh, _incident_ , to come about. It just kind of, well, happened.”

Like he was saying earlier, he’s perfect politician material. A voice like slowly spreading honey, the power of words and filler sounds he can puncture his sentences with at his disposal, and his knack for doing all the wrong things. He’d be Prime Minister within a year.

“You’re apologising?” Louis asks, as though he’s not entirely sure whether Harry’s intentions are honourable or not (they’re definitely not, what with Louis’s curves accentuated in the hang of the wool like that, but those kinds of intentions are a whole different conversation).

“Well, you- uh, you said you didn’t want to remember this. So I thought you were upset.”

“Would you look at that.” Louis says in surprise, before turning on his heel and walking off. If he does that all the time, Harry thinks, he can fully understand as to why Louis doesn’t have friends (or even associations).

*

The one exception to that rule, of course, is Niall. That’s probably because Niall has to be on speaking terms with everybody in the school, which includes the teachers and the cafeteria workers and the after school cleaners (in fact, there’s a line of neat, capitalised writing along the wall of the Inner Lime/Sixth Form Area that reads: **‘If You’re Not Friends With Niall, You’re Doing It Wrong’.** And Harry would think that’s incredibly self centred, if it weren’t for two things; one, being that he knows Niall didn’t write it there, because he saw Fiona McNab do it one lunch time, and the other is that he’s mates with Niall himself.

“I have a plan.” Harry announces, and Zayn groans. The white shirt of sex and the jacket have made their appearance today, and  if Zayn wasn’t Harry’s good friend of more years than he’d ever like to think he’s been in Zayn’s company for, he’d go for it (also, he’s still hopelessly in love with one Louis Tomlinson). “No, it’s a good plan.”

“I bet that’s what they said when they invaded Russia in the winter.” Mutters Zayn from across the table, turning one of the pages of ‘Violets and Buttercups: Twisted Love’.

“You haven’t even heard the plan yet.” Harry says, glaring at the book like it’s offended him personally (but really, what kind of a title is that, it’s like a crime to humanity).

“I don’t need to.” Zayn replies with (false) superiority, eyes flicking across the lines of printed words. “I know it’ll be shit, and Louis won’t love you, and you’ll ruin another of my good shirts with your snotty crying.”

Okay, there’s no need to bring up the shirt debacle. That’s like punching a kitten, a poor innocent kitten who accidentally cried all over Zayn’s ‘treasured’ red shirt.

“Don’t make me angry, Zayn. You won’t like me when I’m angry.” He warns, and Zayn snorts.

“I don’t like you anyway.” See, this is the reason Harry keeps Zayn around. It’s because whenever Liam isn’t around, Zayn is in possession of a fast thinking and intelligent mind.

“Well, anyway. I was thinking, Niall is friends with everyone in the year, right? So if I ask him to talk to Louis, he could make Louis, uh, wanna talk to me. Or date me. Or both.”

Zayn rewards this idea with a glance up from the butterviolets or whatever, and the ghost of a smile flits across his face. “That’s not a half bad plan, if you can make it work.”

That doesn’t make Harry feel any better (instead, it gives him a rush of cold fear, and Harry cannot, simply can fucking not, afford to ruin this any more than he already has).

As it turns out, the one time that Harry needs Niall to appear, he’s uncharacteristically reticent in simply _being around_.As in, everywhere Harry looks, which is all the way around the inside of the Lime Sixth Form area, and then into the library itself -for which he really feels he deserves a medal, because it’s full of the lower years and some of them are basically fanged, spitting beasts- and even gives a quick glance to the corner of the tennis courts. No matter how urgent, Harry wouldn’t actually set foot on the tennis courts themselves, because that’s where the terrifying drugged kids hang around and he doesn’t want to pass out from a concoction of poisonous fumes, and then get pressed into accepting anything (which, believe him, has happened before, and it is the sole reason that he and Ryan Riley are no longer friends. That, and Ryan got pissed at how Harry would keep laughing at his more than alliterative name).

He’s about to concede defeat three days later, and go back to moaning to Zayn about his failures so that Zayn will open up and moan about his own, when he spots a vague blonde dot in the near distance, and Harry’s feet begin moving over the ground before he really registers wanting to move.

“Niall!” He calls out, his breath frosting in the air and floating away in white ribbons. It’s too bloody cold, that’s what it is, but no one ever said that it’s not beautiful. Now not too far away, Niall stops, head swivelling around to look for the caller; Harry would point at himself, but he’s one of the less athletically inclined who does, unfortunately, feel the need to keep his arms moving for balance. “Wait a second!”

“Harry,” Niall begins, looking as though he’s been looking for Harry for a while (and if he has, Harry is either going to kick a wall or kick himself, because both will hurt), but he never manages to get the sentence out, because Harry’s just spotted where Niall was leaving from, and _really-_

“Why were you in the ladies’ toilets?” Harry asks, trying to keep his voice steady like that’s  a normal sort of question that normal people ask.

Although, none of this can really count as normal.

“Uh,” Niall says, fingers pulling at the buttons on his cardigan. His fingertips are almost blue with cold, a funny turning from purple into red shade, and Harry’s overwhelmingly thankful that he remembered his gloves (he’s got to wonder, though, if perhaps his cheeks look like that, because they’re stinging like they’ve been whipped). “I was meeting some girls.”

“Really?” Harry replies, nodding his head, and Niall grins and flushes at the same time, so he looks a little like an ineffably excited radish.

“Yeah, we got on really well, if you know what I mean-”

“I don’t want the details.” Harry interrupts, because he’s not a pervert like Zayn, who happens to enjoy hearing about the sordid minutiae of his friend’s almost-sex life. “I wanted to ask you about Louis Tomlinson.”

“Louis?” Niall asks, furrowing his brow so lines appear in his forehead. There’s still a slight tilt to his lips that makes Harry question as to whether Niall actually ever _stops_ smiling, or if it’s some cosmic plan to try and suffuse people’s happiness.

“Yeah, uh. I wanted to know how I’d. Well,” these words are a lot to big to try and force out of his mouth, “I was more wondering-”

“You talk an awful lot of bullshit.” Niall says, and Harry frowns, because he’s trying at least, give him a break.

“How would I go about attracting Louis Tomlinson?” He says all in a rush, but Niall seems to understand anyway. Probably it’s because Niall speaks so fast himself, it’s like his voice is running full pelt on a treadmill. Or, it could always be because Harry’s voice is glacially slow, so speaking fast only boosts his voice up to the speed of a normal person speaking. Whichever, his point is made, and his cheeks were stinging before but they’re _burning_ now.

“Mate, that’s a whole different topic.” Niall says, and Harry frowns again. “Alright, alright, lemme think.” Adds on Niall, trying to stop the expression spreading on Harry’s face, and purses his lips.

Letting Niall have his few moments of reflection, Harry looks up at the sky. The clouds hung across it are heavy, grey and full like they’re holding in too much, practically being weighed down to Earth.

“It’s going to snow,” He murmurs softly, but Niall doesn’t reply.

“You’re going to have to grab his attention.” Niall pronounces at last, like a priest giving a benediction, and Harry squints through the cold air. The flush in his cheeks has subsided, so the bonus heat that pooled in his face as protection has departed. “Do something that makes you seem less boring than the rest of the fuckers ‘round here. Better be something romantic, too. Although, I’d give it a while- I’m guessing you’ve already asked him out, yeah?”

Harry nods silently, because Niall seems to have descended into a zone of understanding Louis Tomlinson, and he doesn’t want to stop the flow of wisdom.

“Keep your distance a while. If you didn’t already guess, he doesn’t care much for people.”

“Thank you,” Harry replies fervently, because Niall is some sort of gift from above to make sure that Harry makes his feelings clear to the blindingly obvious love of his life. Maybe Cupid, or Aphrodite. Harry’s pretty sure Niall would find the Aphrodite thing weird, though (come to think of it, Niall would just think it’s a great way to have a lesbian experience).

“Rather you than me.” He thinks he hears Niall mutter before walking off, and Harry shrugs to an audience of no one, cause he really rather it was him than anybody else.

*

Harry takes from this encounter a few, ground points:

  * The first is that he should keep a good distance away from Louis (and here his mind makes a helpful suggestion that, in doing so, he should also keep a _look out_ for Louis, just to make any mental notes on what he may or may not be interested in).
  * Secondly, he should be spontaneous and extraordinary, because, yeah, most people here are pretty uninteresting. Which probably includes him.
  * Last, he should also be romantic, and he’s going to have to pilfer one of Zayn’s books again. He’s beginning to develop a nervous twitch whenever he thinks of them.



So, in conclusion, he’s got to be dashing and surprising and the Lord of all things romance. This, of course, is in no way a big ask (Harry thinks –no, he knows for absolute fucking _sure_ \- that the face of Tragic Doom is back in place).

At first, Harry thinks of starting small; this begins with carefully planned timetables of when Louis moves to and from places so that Harry can make sure he knows just where Louis will be at any given moment during the school day, allowing for exceptional circumstances. (Zayn even drew up a poster detailing all these possible events, beginning in beautifully decorative script and devolving into smaller and more cramped scribbles as their imaginations ran away with them. The list begins with ‘Attending a wedding or funeral, so therefore being unable to attend school’ and, as of the current moment, ends with ‘Catching sight of his own reflection in a mirror or reflection on glass surface and being temporarily blinded by his own beauty, and needs time to recover’. Needless to say, the last point was an input from Harry).  
He uses these timetables to great effect; he can perform a near perfect amble around the school area and find himself in a position in which to either strike up conversation with Louis (unlikely), or blush horrifically and stare at him like a small woodland creature facing the barrel of a gun (much more possible).

Still, Harry thinks that the point of all this is that he’s reminding Louis that he _exists,_ and he’d much rather be on the periphery of Louis’s thoughts than outside of them completely. And, one day in the rose tinted future, he could even stutter out a few words instead of choking on past humiliation.

Actually, following Louis around doesn’t give him a lot of spare time, so he’s probably going to fail all his A-levels, and that’s a disaster on a small scale. On the positive side, he smiled at Louis without having to sit down after he’d passed the corner, and that’s a new achievement. Louis didn’t smile back, though, making the whole Louis-Romance thing a disaster on a global scale (they’re Romeo and Juliet without the death, see).

“What’re you doing?” Zayn asks, and Harry huffs out a sigh. Mr Harries is possibly rubbing off on him. It’s one of the free periods that Louis has, and it would look weird if Harry were to begin reconnaissance now and turn up somewhere that Louis has made impenetrable.

“Typing up Louis’s timetable. So I know where he is. It even includes which routes he takes to his classrooms.” He replies, and he didn’t mean to end up sounding proud, but he did spend a lot of time on this, so he allows himself this.

Zayn mutters something that sounds a lot like a badly smothered “Stalker.”

“It’s not stalking if it’s scientific research.” Harry says smoothly, and carries on putting all the ‘Drama’ lessons into his Louis- timetable.

One of the not so positive sides of his life somehow having become Louis’s life is that Louis is beginning to notice. And Harry wouldn’t think it’s a problem if this happened to him –but no would do this for him-, because all the hard work they put into their scientific research-stalking would make the said scientific research-stalking incredibly romantic. On the other hand, each time Harry appears somewhere that he shouldn’t be, like skulking around outside Louis’s chemistry class so that he can melt away with the crowd once the bell rings, Louis looks at him with a vague sort of suspicion. Vague, though, is manageable; it’s the steadily increasing suspicion, all the way from vague to deadly, that worries him.

Well, it worries him, but not enough for him to _stop._

“Fancy seeing you here,” Louis remarks, being the last out of the lab and Harry having waited like the devoted non-boyfriend he is.

“Small world.” Harry replies, and there’s a twitch at the corner of Louis’s mouth like he wants to smile but doesn’t, at the same time. Louis’s probably the only person he knows that physically stops himself from being happy. (And that’s not a romantic plea for Louis to fall in love with him because it would bring him joy) (Although, now he thinks about it, it totally should’ve been).

October brought it warmth when it shouldn’t, due to the English weather not really giving a shit about when it should and shouldn’t be sweltering or freezing, and Louis looks like a sun bleached Adonis.

It’s unfair, because it’s only twenty degrees Celsius, and Harry’s mind is filtering in images of soft sunlight dappling skin and sharp angles and rough touches that are more like gentle caresses.

“You don’t take chemistry.” Louis says, and Harry can feel his mouth drying and possibly his lungs stop breathing.

“No. I-. I like it around here. Very clean.”

“You’d expect that, from a lab.” Louis agrees, and he’s asking a question without asking a question. They’re standing on the white linoleum of a sort of ante-chamber leading out from the actual lab before crossing into the corridor, and the roof of the room is glass, pouring in light. The sun clings to Louis and the exposed skin, lighting up from the sleeves of the navy shirt  down to his fingers.

“Would you?” Harry spares a quick glance around the room before resting his eyes back on Louis again. It’s like being in a gallery, standing in front of a particularly beautiful exhibit that he doesn’t want to look away from. “I wouldn’t know. Don’t spend a lot of time in laboratories.”

“Really?” Louis asks, voice wavering near laughter. “You spend a lot of time around here. You’re probably a certified laboratory expert.”

“No. I mean, yeah.”

“Was that a no or a yes?” Louis says, and Harry has to think about which. Yes and no questions are supposed to be easy.

“I don’t spend a _lot_ of time here.” Clarifies Harry eventually, and Louis nods like there’s nothing in Harry’s voice or words or eyes that is going to make him change his mind.

“So you come over to a lab that you have no lessons in because it’s clean.” Louis murmurs, and he’s squinting at Harry as though he’s missing a piece in the jigsaw.  
Alternatively, he could be squinting at Harry because the sun is very bright and Harry is blocking it’s path.

“Yes.”

Then neither of them say anything, and Harry thinks he should mention how he won’t mention the car/grinding thing if Louis wants to forget it, or maybe he should run and run until his lungs burn and his muscles tear up.

“It’s very quiet.” Louis says suddenly, and Harry looks either way. There’s no one behind them in the corridor, and no one in front of them in the classroom, and no one either side.

“It is.” He agrees, and Louis nods. “Like, heartbeat quiet.” Harry’s not sure whether heartbeat quiet is an actual measurement of noise, and he meant to say ‘Enough to hear your heartbeat’, but his brain screwed up the message on the way to his mouth.

“I have known the silence of the stars and the sea,” Louis says, and Harry can feel the breath drain from his lungs, feel it squeezed out, and he’s going to asphyxiate in this laboratory ante-chamber and it will come down to the fact that Louis Tomlinson is reading poetry to him. “And the silence of a city when it pauses,”

He doesn’t seem to want to say anything after that, his lips moving soundlessly like the rest of the words are not ones that Harry should hear (it doesn’t matter. He’ll Google the poem when he gets home, kick his shoes off before his mum can shout that he’s leaving footprints on the stairs carpet and find out what Louis was quoting).

“Beautiful poem.” He says eventually, and Louis’s head snaps up fast enough for Harry to work out that Louis had completely forgotten he was there. He can draw two conclusions from that; one, that Louis’s comfortable enough in his company to lose himself, or two, that he’s  background enough to Louis that he blends away.

“It’s about war.” Louis replies shortly, shifting his bag better on to his shoulder. Harry’s always surprised by Louis’s arms, because they’re strength and muscle when other parts of him are warm softness. A walking oxymoron.

“Still beautiful.” Harry says, and Louis looks set to move, so Harry does what he does best; opens his mouth, and promptly inserts his foot. “Like you.”

“I told you, Curly, I’m not interested.” He hadn’t called him Curly up till now. Harry is beginning to judge how well a conversation goes by how Louis addresses him (or, if the encounter is, in fact, going along great, he won’t be directly addressed at all).

“I-uh. Don’t listen to me, I talk crap. Like, all the time. No one talks as much crap as me.”

“So you were lying?” Louis asks, like he’s trying to get to the bottom of exactly what Harry is saying, and Harry is currently chewing on the foot in his mouth.

“No, not lying. Why would I lie? I mean, I don’t talk _complete_ crap. Only a lot of crap. So, when I said you’re beautiful, it was true, but I didn’t mean to say it, if you get what I mean?”

“I have no idea what you mean.” And that’s a dampener. It’s never a good sign if someone doesn’t know what you mean. Perhaps Harry should abort mission.

“Well, what I mean was that I wanted to tell you that you’re beautiful, but I knew I shouldn’t, ‘cause it would piss you off. And it did, so I was right, but I still shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t want to piss you off. Although, getting pissed off because someone complimented you is a shitty reason to get pissed off. If someone said I was beautiful, I would grab their hand and dance off into the sunset.”

“Why would you dance into the sunset?” Louis asks, his eyes widening like he didn’t mean that question to slip out. He corrects himself before Harry can open his mouth again and outpour yet more nonsense (that’s a good thing). “More importantly, you talk so much shit, you know? Why are you always here, anyway? Fuck off, Curly.”

So Louis tells him to fuck off, which is impolite, and walks off, which is also impolite, and lastly, Harry is still bloody infatuated with a boy who looks like a god and reads poetry to other boys and that, above all else, is impolite.

*

Harry does exactly what he foresaw he would when he gets home. Namely, this is removing the shoes before Anne can tell him he’s left dirty footprints on the carpet (which is her fault, because she’s the one who had to go and buy cream carpet. Cream is _asking_ for trouble, really), and heading to his computer.

His computer always seems to be taking the piss. When he doesn’t need it, it starts up in a world record time of something under the space of half a second (mild exaggeration, but he knows it knows when he has homework), but when he wants to use it for something useful, like finding out the poem that Louis Tomlinson read out to him in the glass-distorted sunlight of the chemistry off-room, it’s likely another five hours before it fully loads. He takes the time that the black screen takes to remove itself looking around his room, from the blue walls to the grey carpet and the small verging on medium corkboard that he’s pinned with pictures. It’s like an obsession, but weirder and more personal. He gets it, that some people have crushes, but no one else that he knows of has an entire board filled with crafty photos of theirs. Although, Zayn does have a teddy that wears a shirt with a picture of Liam’s face on it, and Harry knows he sleeps with it at night.

They’re all photos taken from a distance and zoomed in, ones where Harry’s seen him in the distance and known it would look to obvious to get too close. It’s like standing by a flame; you go as near as possible, but not near enough.

The poem is Silence by some guy called Edgar Lee Masters. It’s in first person, the narrator thinking about how he lost his leg in battle as a boy asks him the story. It’s beautifully sad, but trust Louis to quote a war poem and not a love poem.

Harry thinks about finding a poem to memorise so that he can overwhelm Louis with his dedication, but decides that after Louis’s done it, Harry will look like a cheap imitation who’s trying to capitulate on Louis’s original idea.

Instead, he opens up Facebook so he can talk to Zayn, because he needs to vent his feelings to someone before he explodes, or implodes, or burns out like a wick.

Harry: **I talked to Louis  
** Zayn: **that’s great! :)**  
Harry: **Not really...**  
Zayn: **did you fuck it up?**  
Harry: **No  
** Harry: **Well, yeah, but I didn’t mean to.**  
Zayn: **what did you do this time**  
Harry: **He quoted poetry at him and I told him he was beautiful. Then I said he got pissed too easily, then he got pissed, and then he told me to fuck off.**  
Zayn: **i said you shouldn’t have stalked him and now look. you’re a failure to romance.**  
Harry: **You’re a bad friend. Maybe I should talk to Liam...**  
Zayn: **if you say anything to him i will cut off your undersized balls, styles. i’m watching you**

Closing down the window before Zayn can give him a reason to carry out with this threat, Harry exhales deeply and thinks about doing something productive.

He doesn’t do it, of course. There’s a vague buzzing in his ears that won’t let him concentrate, and it sounds a lot like Louis Tomlinson reading poetry looped with Louis Tomlinson telling him to fuck off.

*

True to Louis’s wishes, Harry stops following him around. It’s strange, at first, to not let his feet carry him out the door once his own lessons end, but he manages it with iron cast will and a lot of angry thoughts.

“Didn’t think I’d see you back in here. God, began to think I’d never see you again.” Zayn says, because a simple hello is too much to ask for. Harry feels like his brain is dying, and he’s not even hung over. He should’ve got drunk yesterday so this morning could feel like a worthwhile punishment. Even the sun seems wrong, too hot and too bright. Harry wishes it would die out, even though he knows the planet would freeze and later destroyed as the space where the sun was pulls in everything around it and reduces it to dust. (This is why Harry didn’t take any of the sciences. They’re terrifying).

“I want to die.” He declares, and Zayn responds to this by hoisting his bag from under the table and putting it in his lap, before plunging his hand inside and returning with a dog-eared book.

“I thought there would be some sort of woeful problem along those lines, so I thought I’d give you some romantic inspiration.” Zayn says, placing the paperback into Harry’s open palm and attempting to curl the fingers around the edge. The front cover is white, with a pink and black flower to the right. It looks like one of the books that’s left last on the shelf at a charity shop.

“It’s called the _Lust of Destiny._ ” Harry says dubiously, because Zayn’s ideas are always bad ideas, and he doesn’t even need to hear this one to know it’s a bad idea.

(He can conclude, by the end of Zayn’s speech, that it’s still a bad idea).

*

Just because Harry can no longer be anywhere and everywhere Louis is, it doesn’t mean that he can’t occasionally see him around. And although these encounters aren’t orchestrated by Harry, he’s more than willing to use them to his advantage.

“What are you doing?” Zayn asks, when Harry sits up straighter in his chair and looks to somewhere behind Zayn.

“He’s here.” Harry replies reverently. “In the Lime. With us, ordinary people.” Zayn snorts, because Zayn believes that he is more attractive than anyone else in the school, thereby putting himself outside of the realm of ordinary. Unless, of course, Liam walks into a ten metre radius of him and forces Zayn to forget that he’s a hot guy who can pull anyone in the school.

“Why don’t you go say hello?” Zayn says, because Zayn’s a tactless git. “Oh, sorry. Forget you fucked that up.”

Harry makes a hushing gesture with his hands, and thinks about trying to smash Zayn’s face into the table, because the weather’s got colder and Louis looks lovely in grey knitwear. He’s the kind of beautiful that rips at Harry each time he sees him, draws out everything from his body and pours it back in once he’s stopped looking so that he feels like he’s been remade (he’s definitely read too much of Zayn’s shitty books. They’re beginning to affect his thinking mind in grotesque ways).

He watches shamelessly as Louis browses the books, and he wonders why no one else in the room is staring, because Louis might have a serious anger problem and he’s a dick seventy percent of the time but he’s still beautiful. People are supposed to stare about beautiful things, it’s why there are museums and galleries and fashion shows.

“Your staring gives me the creeps.” Zayn stage whispers, and Louis looks up, his eyes meeting Harry’s own in the room with the green walls and green carpet full of people that don’t care that Louis’s here and Louis’s eyes are still blue from across the room and Harry is thinking too much in a short space of time. He feels like one of those machines in films that whirs loudly before erupting steam and falling apart.

Louis nods, an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, and Harry’s still trying to figure out what that meant by the time that Louis’s left the room. Harry doesn’t follow, because you don’t touch the flame, you stand near it.

“I’m telling you, mate, you’re over analysing.” Zayn says tiredly, running a hand over his face. Harry wants to kick him, or something equally aggressive. Maybe he should bring up the time that Liam smiled in his general direction and Zayn needed to use Harry’s inhaler (though he’s been saving that for when Zayn ultimately turns against him and Harry needs a good weapon).

“He wouldn’t just nod at me for no reason, Zayn. Especially really small, like he didn’t want anyone else to see. He’s trying to _tell me something._ ” Harry adds in the last part for dramatic effect; maybe if Zayn can relate this to a pulp-fiction romance, then there’s a chance.

“Maybe it was involuntary. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re very cynical, for a romantic.” Harry points out, turning the page of _Lust of Destiny._ The heroine is stuck in a house fire, and her hero has possibly burnt to death trying to rescue her from the raging inferno as the house breaks down around them.

“Maybe I’m only cynical towards you and your Louis thing. If it was a thing. Which it isn’t. It’s a one sided thing- does that make it half a thing?”

Harry makes a grunt in reply, because that’s all Zayn really needs to keep talking. It turns out that the hero lived, and he’s in her bedroom now, ready to rescue her from the flames.

“Thing sounds weird now. I hate it when that happens. Thing, thing, thing. What kind of a word is thing, anyway?”

Hero is waxing lyrical on all the reasons that he loves heroine. It would probably be touching, if they both shouldn’t be dead from smoke inhalation.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am.” Harry murmurs, and Zayn hums suspiciously.

“You’re still over analysing.”

Over the next week (and one visit from an irate Lottie Tomlinson), Harry does his fair share of stare unabashedly at Louis, marking the curves of where his shoulder joins his neck and where his hip meets his thigh, lets his eyes trace over Louis’s face as he concentrates or how his body works when he moves. In turn, Louis doesn’t acknowledge Harry’s stares anymore, and his certainty that Louis was trying to tell him something in the sixth form area is slipping away. He’s probably wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time that Louis Tomlinson has made him feel like he’s constantly a step behind.

There’s a change on the eighth day, though, and Harry knows that he should stop counting the days of when he’s begun each trial of ways to get Louis to want him. It’s desperate (but then again, so is he. It’s very fitting, really).

“Wait,” Louis says, and the way he says it heats up Harry’s blood. He didn’t know it was possible.

“Louis.” Harry replies, but Louis doesn’t fall in to the trap. He’s not sure why, but Harry wants to know why Louis won’t say his name. There’s probably some metaphorically resonant reason that will haunt Harry his whole life through, but he can’t think of one that fits the bill right now.

“What’s your problem?” Louis asks and, well. Harry could always give him the truth, and say that he’s been in love with Louis for too long and it’s most likely not even love because Harry’s only been watching him from a distance until a kick start from Louis’s sister got him moving, but it feels a lot like it’s described in Zayn’s novels. Not that those books are anything to judge by. In fact, if he feels anything like the characters in those, then he’s probably feeling it wrong.

“I don’t have a problem.” Harry says easily, and Louis’s eyes flick to his mouth to his eyes to a point on the wall behind him. “We’re making a bit of a habit of meeting after English Lit, though. People might talk.”

Louis disregards the last part of Harry’s reply like he never said it. “Why are you always staring at me?”

He’s got to hand it to Louis, there’s no beating about the bush here. If Louis were anymore straightforward, Harry probably wouldn’t be able to cope.  
Now, he decides, is as good a time as any to find out if Zayn’s terrible plans are as terrible as they seem.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Harry asks tentatively, and Louis nods, once, and Harry’s pretty sure he’s making a mistake and it will be Zayn’s fault. “I stare at you because you’re beautiful. The colour of your irises and they’re dark and light and there’s a ring of green inside. How you always look like you live in summer, even when it’s the middle of winter and everyone else is freezing their balls off. I stare at you ‘cause you always wear shirts that fit just right, and the fabric tugs on your waist. Um. Your thighs, and how they’re toned from the football you won’t ever admit to playing but I know you do  because I’ve seen you with a footie shirt in your bag, once. You have really small hands, like, elf hands. My fingers are probably double yours. Well, not double, but you get the idea. And even though they’re small, they’re really delicate and it makes me realise that there are all these tiny bones in there. Your hair; it’s brown when you look at it like this, but when you’re sitting by the window, the sun hits it just right and some of the hairs light up gold. Your cheekbones are really sharp, probably enough to cut open my skin. I stare, Louis Tomlinson, because you’re beautiful.”

Breathing like he’s just run a marathon, Harry looks up from the floor (to whom he’d given this loving soliloquy) just in time to see Louis’s fist in his immediate vision before it connected with his face.

*

“He punched you because you said he was hot?” Zayn says, sitting on the edge of Harry’s bed and not putting much effort in to sounding caring.

“Basically. This is why I don’t listen to you.” Harry shifts the pack of frozen peas that he’s clutching over his swollen eye, wincing as it renews the pressure and wishing himself a thousand miles away and possibly a hermit.

“I know you said he had a few anger issues, but this is- this is _strange._ ”

“Not everyone is sure of their own beauty as you, Zayn.” Replies Harry, spinning in the chair by his desk. He’s still pretty sure that there should be swivel chairs in school. Maybe, if there were swivel chairs to distract him, he wouldn’t have fallen into the deep, self-dug hole of being in unrequited love with Louis. Even a terrible case of dizziness is better than the smothering self-pity he’s got going on right now.

“But still. And it was a good idea, if you’d said it to anyone else. Maybe you should say it to someone other than Louis Tomlinson. Why don’t you find a nice guy?”

Harry deliberates making a cutting remark about how Zayn fixated on a nice guy, and he turns up to school so he can have his heart broken anew every day, but he’s too preoccupied with wallowing in shame to do so.

“At least he’s back to accepting that I exist. And angry sex is still on the table.”

Moving the peas so that they’re pressing more firmly on to his puffy eye, Harry ignores Zayn’s protests at his stupidity, and wonders whether he could try and pin another photo on to the pathetic and possibly romantic Louis shrine that was began life as a corkboard.


	4. Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This too is really late and I'm sorry, I should try and keep up with my chapters more.  
> (Definitely school's fault, and not my own).
> 
> I hope you enjoy the chapter!

** Four: I hate your big dumb combat boots (and the way you read my mind) **

Once the swelling around his eye has died down and faded into smatters of red-purple bruises marking his skin, Harry decides that this was completely his fault.  If he hadn’t rushed in and tried to use clichéd romance scenes, then the forward moving that is his and Louis’s tragic love story would still be gaining momentum.

“I need to apologize.” Harry says, using his mobile to call Zayn because he doesn’t dare use the house phone since he found out that Gemma could listen in to his conversations (and by could, he means that she _did_ ).

“To who? And hello, Harry, nice to hear from you.” Zayn replies, and it’s not like Zayn is one to give him a lesson on manners. Zayn is, after all, the one who used Harry as a human shield when he was being chased by a huge mountain of a guy in the year above because he thought that Zayn had had a fling with his girlfriend. Harry had sniggered, partly at amusement at Zayn’s cowardice, and partly because Zayn spends too much time thinking about Liam Payne to go after anyone’s girlfriend.

“Louis, obviously. I should apologize for my grievous mistakes.”

There’s a rush of air at the other end of the line, like Zayn’s trying to remove every trace of oxygen (and associated gases) from his lungs.

“Have I ever mentioned that you’re fucking stupid? He punched _you_ , Harry, not the other way around. Who says sorry to someone because they got punched?”

“Well, if I hadn’t provoked him-” Harry begins, but Zayn interrupts him snidely.

“-only to compliment him, your boy has someone serious anger issues-”

“-Then I wouldn’t have got his fist in my face anyway. And, for the record, he’s not my boy. Yet.”

True to the form of a shockingly impolite boy with little else on his hands to do except write melancholy love notes that he’ll never send, Zayn mutters an excuse about having something else to do and hangs up abruptly. Obviously, Harry’s forward thinking plans will have to be made by himself, and himself alone.

*

By the time school rolls around the next day, Harry’s feeling pretty confident in his plan. As confident as he can ever feel when it involves Louis Tomlinson, that is, because Louis Tomlinsons are like hidden minefields waiting to blow apart your limbs into the sky.

“Your face looks hideous.” Zayn remarks, and Harry puts the tin he was carrying down on the table carefully before choosing to reply.

“Side effect of getting in too deep with Louis Tomlinson. But,” He carries on, because Zayn opens his mouth to interrupt (Harry should buy sellotape, or maybe the industrial version, and tape his mouth closed so that Zayn can never speak again. Obviously, he’d be unable to eat and then he’d starve, but it could be worth the few hours of peace). “I have made him cupcakes to apologize. Everyone likes cupcakes. It’s in the Bible.”

“That was not in the Bible,” Zayn mutters, but he puts his book down on the table to peer in to the tin. “They have pink frosting.”

“I like pink frosting. The pastel colours always look the best.”

“Don’t talk to me for the rest of the day.” Says Zayn, and Harry’s not going to even try and understand anything Zayn does, because if Zayn can’t appreciate pastel pink frosting then Harry can’t appreciate him.

It’s a long day, and growing lads get hungry, Harry decides by the time lunch has come around. Aside from the fact that he hasn’t grown an inch for going on two years, he’s assured himself enough that he only feels the slightest little twinge about devouring three of the cupcakes, and then pressing one on Zayn (although the git doesn’t deserve one, not with the kind of things he was saying earlier).

“Remind me to tell you to bake for me more often.” Zayn says slowly, and Harry turns his head a fraction so a meagre slice of Zayn’s face comes in to view.

“These aren’t for you, Zayn, they’re for-” Breaking off in the middle of his own sentence, because only he is allowed to be so unspeakably rude, Harry lets his own words sink in and looks despondently  at a box now missing four cakes. “-Louis.”

“You don’t, by any chance, think he’ll notice?” Harry asks hopefully, and the pause in which Harry can see Zayn’s mind fumbling for a reply is a reply enough in itself.

“No?”

Harry’s fingers try desperately to force the lid (upside down) onto the tin as he hurries himself out of there.

*

According to the definitely non-creepy copy timetable that he may or may not still have, Louis should be in the PE office, because Harry finally found out where Louis spent his free time, and it was there. He supposes it’s as good a place as any to get out of the cold, but Harry didn’t try unsuccessfully to avoid any physical exertion for most of his school career to want to go back to it now. Still, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (and Harry’s gotta do this is he wants to do Louis, if you get his meaning).

The PE office is reached by a little staircase almost hidden from sight inside the gym; the gym itself is all squeaky floors and a vague smell of stale sweat. Harry can see himself cowering in the corner during dodgeball and trying his best not to get whacked in the face (he nearly always got whacked in the face, but usually because Zayn used him as a human shield and the offending jock who once tried to sock him one was always on the other team). As for the PE office itself, Harry’s never been there- he’s not exactly ever had the temperament or inclination to require going there. He’s pretty sure you’ve got to want to do PE to go to the office, and Harry’s teachers struggled to get him to aim straight at a football. Harry was shit at football, and Louis was a glorious captain in a fluorescent thin vest, legs like a Greek god and beauty worthy of every sonnet. And even though Harry tried –because he thought that, well, if Louis’s so into football, they could find some common ground to talk about- to work it out, he was still pretty shit. And pretty shit equates to being somewhat horrifically disastrous, a terror in pink, orange or yellow and injuring himself with his own football boots.

“Who’re you?” One of the PE teachers asks once Harry’s head has popped through the stairs. The whitewash ceiling, the exact same colour as the walls but with less wear and tear, looks a bit too close for comfort this high up. Harry’s got some sort of sixth sense intuition that the teacher’s name is Brooke, but he can’t be sure. It’s either Miss Brooke, or Mr King, and he’s sure that a blonde woman with plaited hair isn’t Mr King. He’s not one to judge on appearances, though, so Harry withholds his verdict.

“Harry Styles,” Harry replies, and he can’t say anything more before there’s a snort from one of the other, blue shorts and white shirt teachers sitting (maybe comatose) at their desks. Some of them, though, are attempting to pick at the school salad, that looks like vegetables gone to rot and covered up in the dyed white tears of the masses.

“Are you the kid who kicked himself in the face in football?” Snorting teacher asks, and Harry flushes.

“Yeah, but-” Harry’s interrupted before he can explain that he’d had a stone in his shoe and he needed to get it out.

“Didn’t you hold the record for the most times hit during dodgeball?” Another teacher asks, prising their head off of the desk.

“Well, yeah, but that’s be-” He’s cut off again, and he begins to look for Louis. Who isn’t here. And he should be here. Harry didn’t spend a good few days following Louis around for his schedule to be so easily disregarded.

“Stepped right through a tennis racket and broke all the strings.” One teacher supplies, definitely not helpfully. Harry really needs to get out of here and find the Great Love Of His Otherwise Dreary Life before he does a contortionist backflip over the edge of the PE office and dies sprawled out on a gym floor, like he assumed he would every PE lesson.

“That was-”

“Hit a guy around the face with a cricket bat. _Twice._ ” Adds in a fourth teacher, and Harry’s cutting all of them out of a will they weren’t included in in the first place.

“Locked in the changing rooms all day.”

“Got his head stuck in one of the basketball nets.”

“Dislocated his arm during gym.”

“Lost sight of the school in cross country and ran to a main road before he thought about coming back.”

“Fell over for no reason during a football game.”

Okay, they might all be true, but the last one is definitely uncalled for, and there was a reason. He’s just not going to share with a bunch of testosterone-fueled psychos that Louis Tomlinson showed a tiny glimpse of his torso when he raised his arm and Harry was far too young and uncontrollably in love to be able to deal with things like Louis Tomlinson’s torso, and Louis Tomlinsons should really think hard about their decisions before ever _thinking_ about showing glimpses of their torso.

“Is Louis here?” He asks at last, when they’ve all finished reminiscing over someone they had _completely forgotten existed_ before these past few minutes, and Harry needs to stay on track. Find Louis. Apologise to Louis through the medium of crying and presenting him with tokens of affection. ~~Get Louis to fall in love with him.~~

“Louis?” One of them replies, a guy most likely with more brawn than brains, and Harry would usually care very much about how it’s not good to stereotype anyone, but these fuckers have pushed him too far. “Sure, he’s right there.”

Harry turns slowly, because there’s always time for a freak bolt of lightning to crack the sky in half and fry him to death, but it doesn’t pan out. Louis’s there, behind him, absolutely resplendent in a bloody football kit, of all things, with black and white stripes that should, by all accounts and even the sparse common sense that Harry has remaining, not even work. Louis’s legs are still Greek God worthy, if not more so than when Harry last had to play football, and his hair isn’t even styled, just falling softly into his eyes, and Harry wants to do some sappy shit like kiss him in the rain or card his fingers through Louis’s hair (although, just to clarify, he’s still up for Louis fucking him into the mattress, and that’s unlikely to ever change).

“Oh, hi, Louis.” Harry says, and his voice is breaking and an octave or five too high. It’s too bloody noticeable, and the shame he’s feeling now most likely equals that to burning in the fires of Hell. Or falling in one of those tandoor ovens (he watched a TV programme with tandoor ovens on once, and the heat and danger was enthralling).

“Curly,” Louis says, like he’s been waiting for Harry to notice him all this time and Harry’s disappointed him in some way. Which is not fair, ‘cause Harry didn’t even know that there was anything behind him other that a wall, and he couldn’t check because he was busy having the graves of his past misadventures raked over.

“Hi.” Repeats Harry, like a vinyl record stuck on repeat. He’s got a collection of vinyl records; they’re all old ones that his dad used to own, and nothing like his own music taste, but the scratchy white noise is a little comforting, sometimes. Sometimes it’s downright annoying, though.

“Hi.” Louis replies, and Harry can’t think of anything else to say, and there’s a shedload of vultures (he means PE teachers, he does, but vultures is so very fitting) watching him and probably ranking this somewhere in the chart of Harry Styles’s Most Incredibly Embarrassing Moments. _Don’t say it,_ he urges himself, _If you say it you’ll look like a prat and Louis is giving you the look that tells you not to say it please, if there’s a God, do not say it-_

 __“Hi.” This could be an endearing verging on romantic scene, if he couldn’t, to take the words off of the pages of one of Zayn’s books, feel the “gazes of the crowd burning holes into his back”. That’s probably highly uncomfortable, and Harry prefers his back the way it is (which is, to say, without any holes in). Harry’s just about decided that the primary factor in his sudden mental block is, for sure, the fact that there’s an indecent about of Louis Tomlinson’s legs on show, when the owners of said legs speak again.

“Before you can say hi one more time and I throw you over this wall, follow me.” Harry’s all for anarchy and dispelling the rule, but he follows Louis meekly. He’s of an idea that he’d follow Louis pretty much anywhere.

It’s back down the steps again, and out of the gym where keen eared PE teachers can’t listen in to them. Harry had thought that teachers were supposed to have some kind of professional façade, but obviously not. Maybe he should have some words with the headmaster (although, he’s probably suffering the same lack of professionalism as the people he hired) (Harry should really have a better opinion of the school and people in it. People, of course, not including Louis).

“So, what did you want to tell me?” Louis asks expectantly, and it could be the light, or Harry’s own eyes going funny, but he thinks that Louis’s irises look bluer today, with a small ring of green inside; the thought sends his internal organs into meltdown, save his heart, which swings the opposite way and goes into overdrive.

“I- uh.”

“Naturally.” Louis replies. It’s just; Harry knows Louis’s taking the piss, and he’d be offended. He used to get offended, when every little smile or hello got brushed aside. But now, he supposes, he’s used to it. You can only pine (or not, since he’s so not pining) for so long until you develop a thicker skin.

Then again, it could just be Harry enjoying Louis’s voice, because Louis has a beautiful voice, all rough high chords in staccato rhythms, as though if Louis doesn’t say everything he has to say now, it’ll never get said at all. Harry feels languid in comparison. Also, he’d probably listen to a recording of Louis’s voice stating the letters of the alphabet, if such a thing were available, and then he’d likely have it on loop, too. Go hard or go home, after all.

“I wanted to say sorry,” He begins, starting up the usual apology spiel and bullshit, but Louis interrupts because he’s rude and beautiful and Harry loves him like he’s a previously unknown element that Harry needs to breathe.

“Say sorry for what?” Louis sounds so _suspicious._ The last time he’d sounded this way- Harry had got punched. They’re going in an endless circle.

“Because, um. I said something I shouldn’t?”

“Are you asking, or telling me?” Louis says, and he shifts his body weight so that half of his face falls in to shadow, a near vertical slash down his body.

“Telling. Of course. So, yeah. It’s sort of my fault that you punched me, and I made you cupcakes, because I thought you might like them. Everyone likes cupcakes. It’s the law.”

“How would you enforce a law like that?” Louis moves closer to Harry, to take the tin from his hands, but his hands stay resting either side of the tin, perilously close to Harry’s own fingers, Harry’s own skin and bone and muscle and the heart working overtime is going to give up with all the stress Harry’s piling on it. If he didn’t require it so much, Harry would offer the beleaguered organ a holiday.

“You know. Death and destruction, the usual.” His mouth is dry, his throat like sandpaper as his vocal chords struggle to push out the words. Harry is sorely missing his ‘usual charm’. Perhaps his apparent ‘boyish good looks’ can carry him through, because he doesn’t have a shred of intelligence to even _think_ about clinging to.

“Seems a bit drastic, really.” Louis’s looking somewhere south of Harry’s eyes now, somewhere that Harry is pretty sure is his lips, and as soon as he comes to this conclusion he’s got a terrible, energy coursing through blood kind of urge to wet them. And that’d be bad, because it’d acknowledge that this is a _moment,_ and if Harry has learnt anything at all through his sixth form, it’s that Louis Tomlinson doesn’t like people to concede that there’s a moment going on.

“But they have pink frosting,” Harry replies, because they’re pretty cupcakes even if Zayn took the piss (it doesn’t matter, really, because Zayn’s a grade A asshole with more emotional issues than the average Eastenders character). “Pink frosting is important to society. And the Government.”

“My favourite. How did you know?” Harry can’t tell, anymore, if Louis’s giving him straight answers or not. He’d edge towards _no_ , as it stands, but Louis’s all enigma so he could easily be wrong.

“I’m psychic, didn’t you know. Can tell your future, your past lives, and even,” Harry pauses to drop his voice and put in some extra dreamy quality. He’s surprised how well he’s keeping it together, considering that Louis’s eyes only flick up to his own every so often. “ _Your favourite frosting._ ”

“You must be very talented.” Louis says, and Harry can’t think of anything more to say that doesn’t start in “I want you to kiss me”, so he commits the crime and wets his lips.

It doesn’t have the effect Harry thought it would. Louis’s eyes drift up to his own, make eye contact for three and a half infinite seconds (six and five, Harry notes, six and five), before resuming their previous stare at Harry’s mouth.

“You might want to put the tin down.” Louis tells him, softly, so Harry does. He’s still got the ‘follow Louis into the sunset’ frame of mind on.

Dropping to a crouch slowly, Harry places the tin on cold grey concrete without breaking the hold, and his eyes burn with a need to blink but some things, like the possibility of actually getting Louis Tomlinson to fall in love with him, are more important. His legs seem to take an age to straighten out again, pushing him up from the ground and over the top of Louis’s head.

“Can you kiss me now?” He asks, and his voice sounds fine for the first time in this whole encounter. Fitting.

“If you want.” Louis says, and then Harry is kissing Louis Tomlinson, the one love of his life (as of yet, and most probably as of ever) and he is definitely making Louis apology cupcakes again.

A wall of jagged, chilly bricks is good enough to crowd Louis up against, Harry’s lips pulling against Louis’s own and his hands splayed flat out on the wall, the rise and falls of the brick leaving imprints on his palm. There’s cold air nipping at him, and then there’s heat spreading through him, Louis’s mouth doing something filthy with the way it moves against Harry’s own, Louis’s fingers spreading out under the hem of Harry’s shirt, and Harry can’t breathe (because he has _asthma,_ for fucks sake) and he doesn’t care.

Actually, he does care, because he pulls off to suck in a lungful of air before opening his eyes. His arms still frame Louis, unintentionally pinning him against a gym hall where anybody could come looking, and Louis doesn’t look as if he minds a bit.

“How long have you been waiting for this?”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” Louis replies, one of his hands leaving it’s burning handprint on Harry’s side to tug at the hem of his shirt, pulling Harry by his neck so that there’s half an inch of space between them.

“I have asthma.” Harry whispers, and Louis laughs. If sounds were golden, it’s this one; liquid gold and much more precious. Louis’s still laughing as Harry presses against him, lining up his angles with Louis’s curves and fitting them together; it shouldn’t work, but they do, and that’s sign enough for Harry’s tongue to push entry into Louis’s mouth, and he tastes like cafeteria coffee and under the cologne there’s dewy grass because he must’ve been playing earlier. Louis’s own tongue is much more adventurous than Harry’s own; he swipes up the inside of Harry’s cheek, pulls back, sucks gently on Harry’s lower lip. Harry unsticks (figuratively) one of his hands from the wall, where it’s pressed with little marks, and pulls on some of the stands of Louis’s hair. He was right, earlier; it’s fine and soft and possibly one of the only things Harry could stroke endlessly. Which makes Louis sound like some sort of cat (or a sheep, as sheep are wonderfully soft)- and he’s not, because he’s an almost-perfect human, for one, and Harry is not into bestiality, for a second.

“I fancy a cupcake.” Louis says, and Harry’s selfish enough to rest his forehead against Louis’s own before he moves back. It’s probably worth it, for Louis; if Harry can do anything besides making a good decision, it’s make a fine cupcake.

*

Harry is beginning to sincerely regret not bringing his camera today. As in from the bottom of my heart kind of regret, regret that fills tears with the waters of sorrow regret. It’s Louis’s fault (but, and he’ll probably have this carved into his tombstone as his catch phrase, you just cannot plan for Louis Tomlinsons). It’s just-

“You and Louis actually kissed? As in, both of you? And he didn’t push you away?”

-Sometimes Zayn has the most beautiful facial expressions known to man. He could’ve filled a gallery with the selection of shock, horror, fascination and mild nausea that he’s seeing before him. Harry’s sure that some of the faces are shapes he didn’t even know it was possible for the human face to _create._

“Yes, yeah, mhm. Does that cover it?”

There’s a pause, and the green wall seems to swim around Harry’s vision like something out of a cheap horror flick and Zayn’s face pushed close (a lot too close for comfort, now that he’s in a possibly monogamous relationship) to his own.

“Tell me everything you know.” Zayn whispers, his voice so quiet that Harry almost doesn’t hear it.

He tells him, of course, because he feels like if he doesn’t, he’ll possibly implode like a glorious supernova, and as great as that sounds, he’s suddenly found that he’s got quite a few reasons _not_ to implode. It doesn’t stop him from rubbing salt in the wound and mentioning to Zayn how his sappy books didn’t help him in any way other than receiving a black eye (Zayn scowls and mutters something about extraordinary cases).

*

It’s not like Harry _follows_ Louis there. He’d have to have literally copied him, step by step and ducking behind bushes to have technically followed him. Harry prefers to say that they were both going somewhere, and it’s merely happy coincidence that they both ended up in the same place (except he so totally followed him).

“Most people would just ask me out on a date,” Louis says, without turning to face Harry and reading the spines of various books. Perhaps it’s funny, but Harry has never even stepped foot in the library before. Well, he’s been in the school one, but only when they had to go and read for the easiest English lesson of the week, and everyone sat and chatted with their mates for an hour without even pretending to look at a single page.

“Kind of redundant, that idea. Since you already turned me down, like a cold and heartless bastard.” Harry’s mouth spews out words like it can’t stop, and he wants to over-inhale the dust air in this building until his lungs choke and he can never say another stupid thing.

“Got an image to keep up, Curly.” Louis’s back is still to him, and Harry is no body language expert. He’s not a facial language expert either, but he’s more skilled at deciphering expressions than his is at trying to puzzle out what Louis’s back (and Harry shouldn’t be expected to glean anything there, he can’t see past the black shirt without his mind spinning away to somewhere else). “If I went around accepting dates left right and centre- I’d have been on about three dates too many.”

“Assuming I don’t count, then.” Harry says, shuffling closer because this is a _library_ , and Harry still suffers from the idea that even sounds as quiet as footfalls are enough for the roof to cave in on them- nevermind that there’s only around six people here, including himself, Louis and the librarian, and no one else is in their section.

“Still three dates too many.” Louis’s voice is like warm honey and Harry wants to drown.

He’s just trying to figure out whether that metaphor extended in to drowning in Louis’s voice, or in honey, and whether the first was possible and if the second was practical when Louis’s voice reaches his ears again.

“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off,” and Louis Tomlinson is reading him poetry (again, it’s again, and Harry needs to grab a precarious bookshelf for support) in a musty library corner from a book Harry didn’t know he was holding. If it were a film, there’d be a flickering light, but this is a refurbished, bright white energy-saving lightbulb library and there isn’t a spot of darkness to be found. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.  
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries itself in the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.”

“You’ve got to stop reading poetry to me. It’s very bad for my heart condition.” Harry says weakly, because he’s sure that was a love poem, it was definitely a love poem, and if Louis wants to read out love poems to him in an overly bright section of the local library than that’s fine with Harry, but he’d like some warning.

“I thought you had asthma?”

“But I might _develop_ a heart condition, and you’re increasing my chance.”

Louis shakes his head, and Harry is shifting his weight from right leg to left leg every few seconds in a last ditch attempt not to prance around so that he’s facing Louis and demand some answers. Most importantly, of course, is what is Louis’s favourite TV programme, because Harry judges a guy on their TV (and he’d probably go and watch everything Louis does, anyway, so that they can appear wonderfully compatible).

“So I need to stop reading you poetry?”

“No, that’s not what I meant, I was thinking that you could warn me or something first, and-” Harry’s sentence has begun to wear down like frayed fabric ends when he realises that Louis was joking. Harry needs to keep up, really, if he’s going to try and get anywhere.

“You know my name is Harry, right?” He asks, in lieu of a stretched out silence, and Louis’s right hand reaches out to slot the book back in between others on the shelf. _Adonis_ , Harry thinks disjointedly, and he’s positive he’s thought something similar before but he can’t quite pinpoint the moment. And then Louis turns to face him, and he’s smiling like Harry’s done something spectacular, and the last spectacular thing Harry did was volunteering at the animal shelter and one of the cats clawed into his hair and it took a pair of scissors and some pain relief before he was himself again (plus a few emotional scars) (he had nightmares for over a year).

“I thought you were never going to mention it, Curly.” It might be Harry’s imagination, but he’s positive that Louis is starting to vibrate at the edges like an overworked kids’ toy that’s near explosion. He’s torn between fleeing for his life and diffusing the  imminent explosion. Probably fleeing would do better for everybody, ‘cause Harry doesn’t even know where to start with the diffusion plan.

“So you’ve wanted me to bring it up all this time?”

“Not _all_ this time. Well, most of it. Some of it was waiting for you to try and find a way to ask me out that wasn’t boring.” It’s lucky that Harry’s already in love with Louis, really, or he’d be having a hard time right now trying not to get hurt.

“I bore you, then?” Harry’s not as good as suggesting mild teasing as Louis is, and he thinks it falls flat like a whiny insult. He’d better try and cover that up, frankly, before Louis decides to waltz away out of the too clean poetry section and out of Harry’s life at the same time. “And here I was, thinking all the time that I was something special to you.”

“You were the most dedicated.” Louis allows. He’s probably right; no one else Harry knows would draw up a copy of someone else’s timetable so that they can have a constant lock on them at all times (not including extraordinary circumstances, which include ‘Fallen in river and needs rescuing’ to ‘Captured by secret service and taken away for mysterious interrogation’).

“I deserve a badge.”

“I read you _poetry,_ aren’t you ever satisfied?” Harry’s in freefall staring at Louis, and he’s too far away to make out the six and five but they’re there, irrevocable and like flawed perfections.

“Much better if you read my poetry in bed, you know.” The strike of Harry’s never ceasing bullshit comes again like an unexpected thunder clap. Or perhaps a bullet in the brain, which would finally relieve him from the goddamn need to spew out the crap he didn’t even know he was thinking. “I mean. You could do something more romantic. Like buy me ice cream. Or, I saw a great Barbie in the Argos catalogue, it had butterfly wings, and- have you ever seen the one that’s midway through labour, it’s bloody creepy, why would you get that for a kid?”

Louis stands in the too bright electrical lighting, sandwiched in by tall shelves and squints at Harry like he’s entire head has just exploded, or something equally as disturbing. At a push, Harry could suppose that Louis’s visualising the labour Barbie, but it’s a hell of a lot more likely that Harry’s just confused him with his usual talk.

“We could go to a shoe shop. I need new shoes.” He tries again, and he meant to say something witty and funny that would make Louis want to shag him all night, but no, shoe shop it is.

“Yeah, your shoes are hideous. Haven’t seen those brown boots off you since Caesar was stabbed.” At least Louis’s talking. If only to insult Harry’s choice in footwear (like every other bloody person he meets).

“I like these boots, you know,” Harry tries to adopt so modicum of haughtiness into his voice, but he doesn’t think it’s working. He sounds like he’s putting on a terrible falsetto. “And I’ve just got my wear out of them.”

“I could always burn them,” Louis says thoughtfully, staring at Harry’s feet when he should be lost in his eyes. Perhaps making out with and proceeding to read love poems to guys is something Louis does all the time. “But I’ve always wondered if you were born with them on. I mean, do you even own any other shoes?”

“I- uh.” For a moment (an incredibly long moment wherein Harry’s mind goes beautifully blank as he pictures his bedroom in his mind’s eye and desperately attempts to search for shoes), Harry’s stuck, but then a grainy image filters through and _yes._ “I have some trainers for when I go running. Well, when I used to go running. Not sure if I could even find them now, but I do still have them.”

“Are they brown and worn down?” Harry gets that Louis’s joking this time (praise to the powers that be), so  he keeps down the ‘of course not’ that he was going to reply with initially. Although, it’s not as though he hasn’t already made a fool of himself, he might as well carry on in a similar vein.

“No, they’re luminescent yellow.” He replies seriously, and lets this pronouncement sink in to Louis’s mind. It should be less enjoyable than dropping bombshells on Zayn, because Louis doesn’t let unwarranted emotions slip past, but Harry just likes to enjoy watching Louis in general. It’s like being at a museum of the arts and everyone stands transfixed by the beautiful displays; the only difference is, this one breathes and moves and talks and Harry has a hard time keeping up.

“I’m sure they’d suit you perfectly. Maybe you should wear them on a date.”

“Are you asking me on one?” Harry replies, and there’s a trickle of the charm he’s supposed to have. How that idea even came about is going to haunt him to his dying day. Most of the time is a constant struggle between trying to hold back the flood of words that would destroy every relationship he holds dear, and land him on the street with neither friends nor family.

“Would you come on one with me?” Louis asks, and what a fucking ridiculous question. Harry followed (no he didn’t they simply went to the same place at the same time and it’s all a big coincidental misunderstanding because Harry does not follow hot boys to libraries simply because he wants to know whether they’re exclusive or not) Louis here, he’s more than willing to date the bastard.

“Can you kiss me now?” Louis says when Harry doesn’t reply, and if that prick is actually repeating what Harry said earlier then- Louis Tomlinson is smoother than Harry thought he was. He should sign Zayn up for a masterclass.

“If you want.” Harry says, mirroring Louis’s words from earlier and they feel light on his tongue and this his tongue can’t feel anything but the sudden inrush of Louis who tastes like tea –what a British cliché, except Harry knows full well everyone drinks tea here, it’s possibly one of the only honest stereotypes around- and there’s a hint of dusty books in his smell and Louis must’ve been standing here a while before Harry arrived (although, Harry might smell the same, it is a highly dusty corner).

Walking backwards, Harry lets Louis propel him so his back is parallel to one of the shelves lining the wall. He can’t remember what genre this was now; it’s either war poems or limericks, and that isn’t even important because Harry wore  low cut top and Louis’s mouth has moved down to press wet kisses along the skin there.

“We’re in a _library,_ ” Harry murmurs, because they are and what if someone comes looking here and Harry’s a complete wreck snogging a beautiful guy and choking on dust?

“No one comes down here.” Louis says, pulling himself up to meet Harry’s eyes. They’re definitely close enough for Harry to count the specks in Louis’s irises, and somehow that seems to be very important.

“Six and five.” He tells Louis firmly. Louis, though, doesn’t seem to understand the significance of that pronouncement, and ruts his hips into Harry so that Harry’s own hips buck helplessly into Louis’s. “Are we really doing this?”

“I can stop, if you want,” Louis replies, pressing his own mouth to Harry’s own and dragging the tip of his tongue around Harry’s mouth. Which is an effective way of preventing Harry saying anything, even when there’s a Louis Tomlinson rubbing along him in a near deserted library which is a little similar to a Harry Styles grinding on a maybe drunk Louis in Louis’s car so someone is at fault here and neither of them are going to take the blame.

Harry’s eyes open again when Louis pulls off, mouth half an inch from Harry’s and one of his hands moving up and down along the crotch of Harry’s jeans. None of this, Harry realises glumly, is going to help get rid of his erection. Well, except the obvious, and he won’t put it beyond Louis to leave him hear with a straining dick and no scrap of dignity.

“I could always suck you off,” Louis says calmly, like they haven’t been making out for the past few minutes (and Harry needs his inhaler now more than ever, more than the time he lost his breath during sports day and more than the time he panicked when he got lost in the supermarket and had to go and tell a cashier), “Or I could give you a handjob. What do you think?” It’s like he’s asking Harry about the _weather._

“I think handjob.” Harry replies, and even talking is rough against his vocal chords.

“Good choice, Curly.” Louis says, leaning his head forward to lick (sinfully, Harry’s pretty sure that Louis Tomlinson is an awful person who wants to corrupt him in every way, and Harry before Louis never got handjobs in public libraries) along Harry’s lower lip and undoing the fly of Harry’s jeans with his hand. Before Harry can even think about whether this _is_ really happening, or whether he’s just enjoying –or not- a graphic dream (not that he ever knew his mind was an exhibitionist), Louis’s fingers have moved past the cotton barrier of his boxers and then circle around the base of his cock, sliding upwards, and Harry has no control over his voice or body anymore so the low moan that escapes him is so not his fault.

“You’re a bad influence,” He informs Louis, who doesn’t seem to take offence and repeats the action torturously slow. Maybe he did take offence after all, and this is payback. “If you don’t hurry up someone will come along and see us. Doing the dirty is fine and all-”

“Harry,” Louis says, and pausing to press his own lips hard against Harry’s own before pulling back and letting Harry’s mouth chase him (but not actually reach him, which is strange because Harry is the taller one here), “Shut up.”

“You called me Harry.”

“Looks like I did.” Louis replies, moving his hand faster along Harry’s shaft, and Harry is sure that he’s moments away from impending implosion or explosion or something drastic and shocking and Louis is kissing him like a once drowning man breathes in water and then Harry’s vision blacks out for half a second like all the energy saving lightbulbs in the building just blew, the windows shattered and the sun flickered out.

“That was fun.” Harry says, once he’s zipped his jeans back up and looks a little respectable (except he had to turn his shirt inside out, and if anyone asks, it’s a fashion statement, all the guys wear their shirts like this nowadays).

“I just got you off in a library, and all you can say is _that was fun_?” Louis asks, and Harry nods like he’s seriously only got that adjective available to him.

“I mean, I’m not the one who came in his pants without being touched, but-”

“I can see why you have no friends.” Louis breaks in, and Harry grins because Louis discounted Zayn and Zayn is going to be beyond pissed. Unless, of course, Liam looked his way, in which case nothing matters except their obvious romantic destiny and rose tinted future. “I think we should go on that date tomorrow.”

“To the shoe shop?” Harry thought the date thing was a joke. It’s obviously time for him to rewrite his analysis on Louis Tomlinson’s speech and it’s assorted meanings.

“Perhaps,” Louis says, because he’s still a smooth bastard who likes to recycle things they said in previous conversations, and Harry’s stomach feels like it’s shaped out of lead and his blood is pumping too fast around his body to be natural (he can hear it in his ears).

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,” Harry calls after Louis’s disappearing back, and for a moment Harry is certain that Louis turned around, but the next, Louis’s gone and it doesn’t matter.

Harry’s pretty sure they’re exclusive, unless Louis does this in the library a lot. But unless that’s true (and if it is, then Harry is destroying ever other person to whom this situation also happened) then he’s in a monogamous relationship with the one great love of his life, and he should think about hiding the corkboard in his room before Louis ever has the chance to see it.


	5. Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Raoul voice] forgive me, please forgive me, I did it all for you...
> 
> In other words, I CAN'T EXPLAIN HOW SORRY I AM THAT I HAVEN'T UPDATED IN OVER TWO MONTHS I AM A DIRTY SINNER SEE YOU IN HELL.
> 
> No but if you're reading this, I love you for sticking with me even though I am a terrible person who deserves no one's niceties. I hope you enjoy the chapter, beloved reader, since it's taken so long for me to get myself together and write it (shameless self-promo: in the two months that elapsed, I did actually push out a couple of one-shots, so I have not been all that lazy. Just quite a lot lazy).  
> Also, if there's a point where my writing changes, that's probably where I picked up again two months later. Look how awful I am, dropping off mid-chapter. I can only apologize.

** Five: I hate the way you’re always right **

“Studies suggest that teenager Harry Styles is proved to have a more successful love life than Zayn Malik. Scientists are baffled.”

Through the speaker of his mobile (he’s still not going to trust Gemma. Like a wise man once said (probably), don’t trust your sister not to listen in to your phone conversations) he hears Zayn sigh deeply, and no doubt filtering through in his mind for the perfect, philosophical quote to match his melodrama.

“Nothing to it, really. All you need is to be willing to get punched in the face and deliver them cupcakes. Et voila, making out in the library.”

“Did you really just say et voila? You’re not even French, you prick,” Is Zayn’s reply, because Zayn is disgustingly impolite and won’t attract Liam Payne if he says things like that. To be frank, Harry’s pretty sure that a naked Zayn could twist his body around Liam’s own and Liam would smile happily like this sort of thing happens to him all the time. It’s like trying to pull in the attention of a well-meaning brick.

“But Zayn, I have a date. With _Louis Tomlinson._ ”He stresses. It’s getting a bit alarming how, even to his own ears, Harry sounds like a twelve year old girl with a poofy pink diary and lovesick eyes (for starters, his poofy diary is orange, and he hasn’t written in it since the ‘Harry Tomlinson’ signing that forced him to hide it away in shame. If it wasn’t more likely that it’d end in him having to watch the flames lick their way through his house, he’d have set fire to it). “You know, the great love of my life, my one and only, the single person in this entire world that I want to spend every waking moment with, my soulmate et cetera-”

“Harry,” Zayn butts in, which is kinda useful because Harry’s seriously running out of adjectives with which to describe his and Louis’s beautiful, transcending love, “You’re making me ill. Even worse than the time you told me to eat a kilogram of caster sugar for a laugh and I puked for days.”

“We used to be such fun.” Harry says, staring at his ceiling; you never know, if you try hard enough, a little television might come down through it and play back the best of the good old days. “What happened to us?”

“In your case, definitely, we regressed.”

“You always hurt me when you bring in the big words. You’re lucky I love you.”

Zayn snorts, and Harry can see him in his bedroom, with the teddy emblazoned with Liam’s face hidden under the duvet because he doesn’t want anyone to see –and that’s a waste of time and effort, because Harry’s trashed Zayn’s room before looking for incriminating evidence and he found it _years_ ago.

“Where’s the date, then?” For a second, a long and paralysing second wherein Harry can’t move and the bottom just dropped clean out of his world, there’s a terrible blank space in Harry’s memory that he can’t work around. Turning his head to narrow his eyes at the board plastered with photos of Louis, he tries to run over the entire library encounter in his head and not ending up reliving an unanticipated handjob. It’s a lot harder than you’d think, really.

“I don’t think he mentioned it.” Harry says at last, dragging out the words on his tongue in case he needs to withdraw them at a moment’s notice. He’s pretty sure he’s got the right answer, though. There was definitely no concrete planning of an actual, physical date; there was an agreement to a hypothetical date that will, if Harry has to break every bone in his left hand to do it, see the light of day. “Well, he mentioned the date, and the going on a date, but no specifics. It leaves a kind of ambiguous appeal to whole thing, don’t you think?”

“I think you’re so full of crap it’s a wonder that you can find anyone who even wants to date you. I’m surprised we’re still friends. In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t decapitated you by now, you’re just such an-”

“Did you hear the one about how Batman likes his drink?”

With all the speed of a turbo jet, Zayn’s pressed to end the call before Harry can even spell out the word of the punchline.

“Just ice,” He whispers in to the phone receiver. “Just ice in a drink, and Batman wants justice?”

Perhaps Zayn is affecting the signal, but Harry’s pretty sure that even the absence of noise sounds disapproving.

*

At first glance, Harry is pretty certain that there is something fundamentally different about the sixth form area, and he can’t quite work out what it is. The walls are their usual, vibrant shade; the carpet is it’s usual threadbare self. As far as Harry can tell (and, not having paid over much attention to it beforehand, can’t place too much certainty on it), the furniture hasn’t been moved around.

So, in conclusion, it must be something to do with the delightful student body.

“Does something seem off to you?” He asks Zayn once he’s sat down, and one of Zayn’s eyebrows arches so high that’s Harry worries that it may fly completely off of Zayn’s face. On another look around, Harry can confirm that there are still no swivel chairs. He’s taking this matter to the headteacher, soon, because, as they say, if you’ve got to do it, do it yourself.

“I dunno,” Zayn says, and the eyebrow hasn’t yet returned to it’s original position. Harry loves Zayn, yeah, but that facial expression is something else. “Could always be that everyone in the room is staring at us.”

Now that Harry checks again (his neck will have a crick in it by the end of the day, there’s probably rules against twisting around to get a good look at the room you’re in _three times_ in a row, but whatever. Live fast, die young), there’s definitely more people looking at them which is normal. And considering normal ranges from none, to that eyelash fluttering mob of year ten girls that creep in and blush furiously at Zayn, the fact that everyone is looking their way is somewhat out of the bloody ordinary.

“What did you do?” He mutters, trying to aim for discreet. Craig with the last name Harry has steadfastly been remembering then forgetting learnt how to read lips about three years ago, and he can see his face in the corner of his eye. It’s a lot harder trying to speak and produce coherent words, though, so this could always be all over the school by the end of the day. Or hour. Their school has a highly effective grapevine system.

“Me? You think this was _me?_ I haven’t done anything but listen to your hormonal problems.”

It’s probably true, Harry reflects. The only other interests in Zayn’s life (aside from Harry, naturally) is crying over Liam Payne and reading crap literature.

“Well, I didn’t do anything.”

“You made out with Louis in a _library_ , someone must’ve bloody seen you. Can’t leave you alone for ten seconds or you’re off shagging guys left, right and centre-”

“Zayn,” Harry breaks in, because Zayn on a tirade can tirade on for quite a while, “It was a handjob in the library, actually.”

Alienating Zayn could become a full time profession of his. At last, Harry’s found his true calling in life.

“I don’t know if I should be disgusted, or proud.” Zayn whispers, in a way that’s much too loud for the stale air in a sixth form area full of people who’re (still. They’re _still_ at it. It’s like Harry’s either mutated so he’s grown another hand out of his head, or he’s being creepily followed by obsessive fans. He’s pretty sure neither of which are likely) staring fixedly at them both.

“I’ve broken you.” Harry replies, grinning to nobody in particular. Nobody in particular is somewhere in the vicinity of Liam Payne, who takes it upon his good self to wander his way over with an expression of Highly Serious Intent. He looks like a boy scout undertaking a deadly mission to battle vipers.

“Liam,” Zayn pipes up. There could be a kinder description of Zayn’s voice, Harry guesses, but taking in to careful consideration that all the blood in the region of Zayn’s face has drained away and his vocal chords have gotten themselves into thinking that Zayn talks in a near falsetto, it’s surprisingly accurate. “How err you?”

“Err?” Liam repeats, and Harry’s eyes switch between the pair of them like an overly zealous spectator at a tennis match. Except, instead of firing shots at each other, they’re sending of misread signals and terrible flirtations (which is mostly on Zayn’s part, admittedly, but Liam probably wouldn’t realise Zayn was into him if Zayn stripped off and performed a sensuous mating ritual on the shitty rough carpet with him).

“I am are. I mean, I meant are. I meant are. Definitely are.”

Being the considerate and thoughtful person that he is, Harry cuts over Zayn’s speaking crap to ask a question of Liam himself. It’s hard, really, trying to concentrate with the ‘soft liquid brown’ of Liam’s irises fixated _somewhere behind Harry._ Like, at Zayn.

“Did you wanna talk to us?” Harry says, and Liam’s eyes slide quickly from dazedly unfocused to sort of worried/abashed. Wabashed.

“Well, I wasn’t sure if I should, ‘cause it’s all your business. But people were saying stuff.”

“Yeah?” Harry, because he’s a cool as cucumber with ounces of maturity, is so not hanging on to Liam’s every word. Zayn, despite his increased age, is not as restrained as Harry. Though, that could be something to do with how _weirdly_ fit Liam looks in a white, sleeveless top. Those are the kind of biceps that could lift Harry up and throw him across the room. It’s probably a simultaneously dark and wonderful time for Zayn Malik.

“They said you’re going out with Louis Tomlinson.” Liam carries on, regardless of how close Zayn is to salivating like a dog, and Harry’s lungs deflate without his permission in a pent-up sigh.

Unless, by some small gift of the gods, Louis doesn’t care, he’s just about to lose his date.

*

Small chances given as a gift from the gods are easier to come by than Harry thought they would be. Louis could always be a good luck charm. Like some people have lucky underwear, Harry’s got a Louis Tomlinson. Not that he’d wear a Louis Tomlinson. That would be morally wrong.

“People think we’re dating,” He tells him, ears freezing off in the winter air that felt suspiciously like summer air not yesterday. That’s the problem with British weather, aside from the constant raining; it’s simply too fucking changeable.

“Aren’t we?” Louis replies, and Harry’s still not quite come to terms with the fact that he has to look down to make eye contact and somehow, that’s a turn on when it shouldn’t be. He could be one of those guys with weird kinks. A Louis kink.

“Well, yes, but I didn’t think you’d want everyone to know, I mean-”

“If I didn’t want them to know, don’t you think I would’ve stopped the rumours?” Louis asks, and Harry can feel a reply to a _rhetorical question_ burning it’s way up his throat, like he’s been keeping them pent up for years and they choose now to make their one bid for freedom.

“Yes, but sometimes people like to gossip just ‘cause they can, you know, and you seem pretty private. Like, I didn’t think you’d be okay with letting everyone know so quickly. Not that I mind. I don’t mind. Actually, I’m really glad, this is great.” _Words burning everywhere around him and burning to ashes like his dreams of a happy suburban life with Louis Tomlinson._

“If I was so in to privacy I wouldn’t go giving hot boys handjobs in a public library. What do you take me for?” Understandably, Louis most likely thinks Harry’s a nutter. To be frank, Harry’s pretty sure that he’s a nutter, so it probably equates somewhere along the line (he wouldn’t know, because he didn’t take maths. Maths is crap).

He’s just going to answer with ‘a beautiful creature hand crafted by the gods’ in reply to Louis’s –yet again rhetorical- question when Louis breaks in. This is the fault of Harry’s internal monologues, because without them he could’ve totally aced the spontaneous romance thing, which makes the fact that Louis will stay steadfast in the belief that Harry is certifiably insane all Harry’s own fault. No greater enemy than yourself, after all.

“I really wanna kiss you now. Can I kiss you now?” Louis says, like these sort of requests drop out of the sky every day. Who knows. Perhaps, in Louis’s world, this is a social norm.

“I dunno, I mean, there could be all sorts watching, and I don’t want to push my luck, not so soon after the library thing, and what if someone comes and sees us doing-”

“It’s not as though we’re doing the horizontal mambo,” Louis interrupts, because Harry simply cannot get a word in edgewise, and before he can volley back another articulate and witty response, Louis’s reaching up on his toes so he can kiss Harry, and as much as Harry wants to stand on his dignity, he’d rather make out.

The air is frigid, running like knife edges along his exposed skin, and Louis’s nose is a cold point against Harry’s cheek, Louis’s fingers like sculpted ice around Harry’s neck.  
Harry could like this indefinitely. Maybe until his balls literally froze off.

It’s like the air is turning to ice around them, the moisture in the air giving up the ghost of ever having been moisture, but Louis kisses like a bonfire at night, the warmth spreading out from him, lips pushing and pulling against Harry’s, and wherever Louis touches Harry burns cold, then hot, his skin on fire in the middle of winter.

“I’m definitely not against the idea of the horizontal mambo,” Harry decides thoughtfully, resting his forehead against Louis so he’s speaking these words like they’re only for Louis to hear (which, they are, but _spontaneous romance_ ).

“We barely know each other.” Louis points out, and Harry’s quick enough to catch the tail end of a grin. Louis’s joking, and Harry’s serious, and one add one equals-

-“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a perhaps.”

*

Louis’s idea of a date is propositioned to him when Harry’s trying to eat his lunch, and Zayn is staring mournfully at Liam’s turned back.

“A lot of people seem to be staring.” Louis says, from right behind Harry, and Harry doesn’t jump because he’s in control of every single reflex in his body, but he does nearly punch Zayn in the face for reasons unknown. His shock might’ve transformed itself into a buried desire to knock out his best mate.

“It’s because I’m really hot,” Harry replies, glancing around the room again and trying to meet anyone’s eye, “They hadn’t noticed it before, but now I’m off the market, they all suddenly realised how breathtaking I am.”

“Monogamy is a big step.”

“If you want, I’ll go take advantage of everyone in this room wanting to screw me and I’ll go have some fun with those guys over there.” Tilting his head to the group that Harry’s eighty percent sure once made a pentagram in science out of every preserved animal in the lab, he tries to manually keep his heartbeat low. It doesn’t work. that’s probably a highly evocative metaphor for his life.

“How d’you know they’re not staring at me? I mean, you gave me a whole speech on how hot I am.”

“They already knew you were hot,” Harry dismisses, waving his hand with too much emphasis and nearly whacking himself in the face, “But they didn’t realise about me. They’re all just so wretched that they never tapped that before it was too late.”

“I think-” Zayn says, leaning across the table. Looking over, Harry spots a dot of white as it moves out of the doors, so that explains Zayn’s sudden reappearance into the world of the living. “-that everyone here is wondering why I put up with you at all. I’m obviously much better than both of you.”

“Tell that to Liam.” Harry ripostes (it’s enough for Zayn’s cheeks to look as though they’ve been swiped with red paint, and his eyes narrow to slits for the rest of lunch. Harry’s wholly unimpressed by how he’s still attractive).

“I believe we had a date sometime.” Says Harry, when there’s been a long enough lull in the conversation to show that Zayn hasn’t got anything else to say on the matter.

“We did, yeah.” Louis agrees, his leg a bare centimetre from Harry’s own. If he doesn’t keep up his high standard of self control, Harry’s going to fall over and cry with the pent up excitement from _how close is Louis Tomlinson look at the proximity to Louis my boyfriend Louis_.

“Did you have any idea of when the date was, or do I guess it psychically?”

“You don’t have any covert psychic ability, then? Disappointing, Harry. I expected so much more from you.”

“I could try and learn it, if you want. Probably look like a good A Level. Lots of uni’s would take me in if I could tell them that I studied telepathy.” Harry’s speaking, miraculously, even though he’s attempting both to watch Louis’s hand, which is moving down his thigh to rest over his knee, and also make it look less obvious that he’s totally waiting for Louis to hold his hand.

If all else fails, he’ll revert to the age old method of yawning and stretching an arm around the back of Louis’s chair. And, after that, he’ll pull him close and they’ll kiss passionately with the flames of their love.

“Has anyone ever told you that you talk a lot of shit?” Louis asks, the hand that isn’t on his knee propping up his head. His ring finger is curled against his lips in a way that is definitely completely and one hundred percent in no way a turn on but is also most certainly a turn on.

Like, Harry’s not thinking about marriage. It’s coincidence. Harry is a strong believer in coincidence. Besides, he waded through the connubial phase three years ago, give or take a couple of months. (There was sombre gazing at a selection of gold bands and once, an attempt to wander casually into the local dressmakers that resulted in a lifetime ban. Which isn’t his fault, because he didn’t even mean to try on the dress).

If Louis isn’t careful, Harry’s going to carefully snap off his ring finger and put it in a velvet box for safekeeping.

It’s Zayn, with his pout in place and eyes beginning their _smoulder,_ who answers. “If we can move on from Harry’s lack of brain to mouth functions, can we all just play it cool. Like, ice. Be ice.”

Perhaps this is a godly sign from the macrocosm above that Harry has been around Zayn for far too long: his eyes stay trained on the crook of Louis’s finger, and he still could gamble his Louis-board that he knows Liam Payne is making his way towards them with all the mal-intent of a woodland creature. A polite, benevolent woodland creature. Like a rabbit; or a mouse, with large eyes. It’d be the sort of sickening mouse that would divide it’s food between the other mice, and the rest of them sort of want to kill Liam, but also _can’t_ , because gits like that are too fucking nice.

Once, Harry socked Zayn’s eerie Liam-doll in its teddy face, and Zayn made him apologise. The whole thing haunts him on shadowy, tempestuous nights.

He should probably explain this to Louis, seeing as how Zayn’s fallen into his usual fear induced stupor. “Liam coming in at twelve o’ clock,” he says, because it makes his life sound as though he’s part of an action film. He’d be a crap action hero, and he’d probably get blown up in a couple of seconds. So fuck the whole hero thing. “Well, Liam. Walking over here. Maybe.” Not the finest explanation Harry’s ever given, but not the worst. He did have to account for a tear down the side of a woman’s wedding dress, after all.

“Shouldn’t you have a codeword for that, maybe-” Louis begins to ask, but some prick commits the sin of cutting across him. Harry would fuck shit up, but yeah, he’s not going to risk a battering like he’s got before.

It’s like a voodoo chant. “Liam-Liam-Liam,” Zayn whispers. Whispers carry louder than low voices, Harry’s told him before. If Zayn owned a single drop of sense, it’s long since leached out of his brain. “Liam-Liam-”

Harry could smooth his hair down, if he wanted; even better yet, he could murmur comforting words until the (frankly humiliating for the all of them) storm passes. But, there’s Louis’s hand that has begun to slide across his leg, and he might _hold his hand._ And Harry is twelve: this is a huge step for him.

“He loves you very much,” Harry tells him as quietly as he can, “Even if he doesn’t know it yet. Of course he loves you. His own mother probably loves him less than you do.” Which is true, but most likely not what Zayn wants to hear. Unless Zayn enjoys detailed accounts of how fucked up he is, in which case, Harry can not only oblige, but also empathize.

“That’s not going to work. You’re still talking shit.” Louis interrupts. See, Louis can interrupt Harry, because Harry’s voice is a still sea of dreary monotony. Louis could interrupt a woman in labour, or a speech from the Pope, and Harry would listen rapt.

Even if Louis doesn’t have a bloody clue what he’s talking about. Wanker. “It’s worked before, you know. He gets these a lot.”

(Harry’s not thinking of the time that Zayn referred to them as a _tidal outpouring of passion,_ because that was a dark period for the both of them and neither wants to remember it).

Slowly, Louis’s face falls into a frown, but his eyes are bright. It’s as though there’s a spark lit behind them. “Panic attacks over Liam Payne?” Is all he asks, so Harry nods without replying.

He does take the time to carry on using his words as a salve for Zayn, though, because a Zayn in the throes of fright is no fucking good for anything, not even for Harry to castigate over his predilection for dire books. “See, look, he’s gone past. In the corner. I think he’s talking to some girl. No, I don’t know her name, because we don’t actually talk to anyone. In case you didn’t realise. How the fuck would I know if they have a _thing,_ I don’t practice magic, and I don’t follow him home-”

At some point during his (increasingly less soothing) speech, Harry forgets to keep an eye on the entire focus of Zayn’s terror. Louis, naturally, is a dick who doesn’t think to warn him; so when Liam first talks, Harry’s whole body quivers and his knees slam onto the underside of the table. It hurts like a bitch (whatever a bitch hurts like), but Harry’s going to overlook it. After all, this is Zayn’s moment to shame himself.

“Hi, uh. Zayn, isn’t it?” Liam says, which isn’t a great start. Actually, it’s a pissy start, and Harry would knife him if he had a knife or homicidal tendencies. As of this moment, he has neither. “I wondered. Yeah. Well.”

Zayn, his cheeks stung a deep red, still looks like he’s stepped down from a runway; so Harry is hopeful for him. “Hey, Liam,” He replies, all too breathless and eager. Harry’s hopes are twisted and stamped on.

“I was thinking,” Liam ploughs on. Harry admires a warrior such as this. “There’s this thing. I mean. My parents got these tickets for this poetry reading thing, and we’ve got a spare, so. I thought that you’re into this kind of thing. So, yeah.”

Absently, Harry notes how fucking often Liam has to cement his sentences with filler words. What sort of a sentence is _so, yeah,_ anyway?

No one says anything. They may as well be the slumbering courtiers in Sleeping Beauty’s palace. Not that any of them are Sleeping Beauty (but if it were, it’s Zayn, seeing as how he’s the bitchy one).

When someone does speak, it is Liam again. Even he is flushed now: the pain is nearly tangible. If Harry could taste it, he’s sure it would be salty with the unshed tears they’re all keeping in. “I thought you might wanna go with me. If you want. Like, it’ll probably be shit, but. I’d like it if you’d come.”

Zayn nods, once and then once more, so quickly his hair bobs on top of his head. It jars with the whole _smoky_ effect Zayn’s been going for, but that, Harry is sure, is merely a reflection of Zayn’s life. “Sure. Sure I do. That’d be great, yeah.”

The both of them grin like idiots for three minutes straight, so Harry takes the burden upon himself to ask Liam the necessary information that would actually result in Zayn getting there without such hitches as _where the fuck was it anyway_ and _oh balls I’m two hours late._

When Liam takes his leave, Harry misses that it even happened, because Louis’s index finger draws a line down the back of Harry’s hand leisurely; still, he doesn’t take Harry’s hand. “I’ll see you after school,” Louis says.

Fucking Louis Tomlinsons these days, Harry thinks, dating a guy just to scrounge a lift home off them because he’s too fucking idle to drive himself. It’s simple misfortune that Harry is so far past the point of no return that he doesn’t care in the slightest.

Not even at all.

*

Harry gets it. Sometimes, life screws you over. But still, he doesn’t expect Louis to be spread across the bonnet of his own car like some kind of overly graphic drawing. He’ll be thinking about car sex for weeks, and that’s not the sort of shit he needs in his life right now.

It’s the wind that carries his answer, buffeting him and taking his breath straight from his lungs. Fucking wind. “If you don’t mind,” he calls, and even then he’s sure his voice sounds faint, “I’m gonna be needing my car. I can’t drive if you’re blocking the windscreen.” There’s no sign of movement from Louis; until there is, but it’s only to slide a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them over his eyes. It’s a travesty, for every moment that Harry can’t write inner poems on the exact shade of blue of Louis’s iris. They put the sky to shame.

“I was hoping you could give me a ride, darlin’,” Louis shouts back, strident enough that half of the carpark turns to watch them. Harry’s going to fall to his knees, in the non-sexy sense, because Louis’s accent is actually pretty shit and he’s publicly propositioning him. “If you’re goin’ my way.”

If he needs to, Harry can actually move pretty fast. He’s like a honey badger; looks pretty harmless, but then it’s a flipped switch. Except Harry doesn’t twist inside his skin, because that’s disgusting, and neither does he butcher animals. He’s been vegetarian since he was six; his mum told him nuggets did not genuinely begin their life in Tesco’s frozen aisle.  
The point is, he reaches Louis in time to catch the tail of the sentence, and then there’s no reason for Louis to shout. Still, most people have stopped their sprint away from the blazes of perdition, and they’re the object of focus. Louis Tomlinson is dragging him unceremoniously into the limelight.

“Just get off the car,” he whispers. It’s a stage whisper, perhaps, because this wind is bloody fierce and he can’t even hear his own heartbeat. “You’re making a _spectacle._ ” Harry is sure he’s turned into his sister, who once attempted to shove him in a bin for staging a little sit-down protest at the aforementioned aisle of frozen produce. The horror with which she’d told him that he was _making an exhibition of himself_ plagues him, even these autumn days of his life.

Louis, because he’s a dick, laughs so much that he whacks his head on the car. For a second, Harry is torn between checking the car for a dent, and pulling Louis towards him and not quite letting go. Like, only after he’s yelled a bit until his face is suitably angry, and Louis is suitably ashamed of attempting to smash in his skull without warning a guy.

Apparently there is no damage to either. It does allow Harry to yank Louis off the car, though; he wonders whether he should nick the glasses and chuck them across so someone can run them over, but well. He’s bitter, but not that bitter. That’s the sort of bitter of someone who’s swallowed a lemon and lived. Hardcore, lemon-eating heroes who live on the edge of reality.

Once they’re in the car, and Louis is still quivering with pent-up laughter (Harry hates that he’s possibly in love with him, and what he despises even more than that is that he loved him before Louis even knew his name. Destiny takes the piss), Harry can breathe again, and pretend that no one is crowded around them with brightly interested faces. He attends a school full of vultures.

“You going to tell me what that was about,” Harry says, in a passable impression of his mother, “Or do I have to guess?”

He’s sure Louis’s been drinking, but there are no traces of alcohol lingering in the air. “Why don’t you _make_ me tell you, Harry?” Louis retorts, his voice even higher with falsetto. It’s becoming a flip between punching Louis, or punching himself. He’ll probably go for the latter, just to spice it up, seeing as how he’s the only one who hasn’t had the honour of punching Harry Styles.

Ever so slowly, the people around them find something more worthwhile to slide towards. “I’m going to drive away,” Harry tells him firmly, “And I’m going to leave you on the side of a road somewhere. Where you can’t embarrass me like that ever again.”

Louis leans forward until there’s an inch of space between his mouth and Harry’s ear. His breath is hot on Harry’s skin, and Harry’s blood is hot in turn, boiling in his veins. “I’m pretty sure you enjoyed it,” Louis’s mouth doesn’t move, even when he’s spoken; he’s just breathing, in and out steadily. Harry’s heartbeat, loud once more, becomes erratic. He’s going to die young. Somehow, Louis has made him into a martyr. Their love story shall be written in the years to come as a great tragedy.

“I want you to drive,” Louis says. Which, you know, typical. Don’t give Harry a break in which to say anything. “But I want you to keep driving. Don’t stop until I say.” The way he says it makes the small hairs on the back of Harry’s neck rise. Maybe that’s because Louis with sunglasses has made him horny.

Still, even the most solid of believers have their doubts. “You’re going to give me travel instructions?” He asks, like there’s never been such a stupid idea. There have been many worse ones: for example, a teddy bear bearing the face of Liam Payne; another, a corkboard with blurry snapshots of Louis Tomlinson.

Harry’s having a sudden epiphany. It whispers to him, vaguely, that he should probably see a therapist.

“No,” Louis replies quickly. “I want you to drive, and then I’ll take you on a date when we’ve got ourselves properly lost.” The glasses have begun to slip down his nose so far that Harry can see the top half of his eyes; he’d wonder who he borrowed them from, since Louis swears he hates pretty much everyone, but it’d only take him down a thorny path of green eyed monsters and wrestling with his inherent envy issues. “So it’ll be something new for both of us,” Louis adds, even when the point was quite lucid enough.

It hits Harry (the way a bullet hits a body) that Louis is actually worried; worried, maybe, that Harry’s going to scream that his idea is shit and he’ll take the walk home.

Really, Louis is fucking clueless, for all he thinks he’s so sharp.

“Left or right?” Harry asks, once he’s fished the keys from Louis and plunged them in the ignition. Beneath his left hand fingers, the engine splutters. Beneath those of his left, Louis’s skin is warm, and his pulse jumps.

Louis pauses, and the silence is light; Harry is light, too, ready to leave the ground. If he wasn’t strapped in with his seatbelt, because as the Romans thought, prevention has got to be better than cure, you know? “Right.” Louis says resolutely, even though his eyes flick between the two roads. “We should definitely go right.”

Twisting his mouth in an attempt at letting him down gently, Harry decides for quarrelling. “Everyone knows you’re supposed to turn left. Always go left. Left is, you know, where all the good things happen. Left is the _yellow brick road._ ” It’s funny (and fucking weirdly out of character) that he hasn’t noticed Louis’s jacket is an oversized denim shirt. Harry’s cold heart is a flutter with thoughts of domesticity.

“Then we should do something different, because everyone else are wankers and don’t know what they’re missing out on.” Louis says, more decisively, and Harry gives in meekly because this is his object of lustful (and romantic, because there is always time for romance if he can squeeze it in) fascination since the dawn of time itself. “So, right. We’re going right.” Louis reminds him, as though Harry has literally wiped the last few minutes from his mind.

Of course he can’t. He’ll be forever struck with how the sunlight is a balm on Louis’s skin, and lights it gold.

He takes the right turn.

*

Three hours later, even Louis Tomlinson has to learn to accept defeat. The car shudders to a halt; Harry can’t see shit out there, because the winter sky is dark as Zayn believes his soul to be. If it weren’t for the harsh patter of rain droplets on metal, he wouldn’t know the rain were there (and he can see it in the flooded yellow light from the car headlights).

“I told you we should’ve stopped at that first town.” Harry says. He tries to avoid smug, and patronising, and the fearsome condescending, but he’s a pitiful failure. Lucky, really, that he’s fully aware of his own shortcomings at letting something go, or else he might not be trapped in a car with Louis.

Which, you know. Sounds like the start of a porno. And he’s not entirely opposed to it (aside from the whole filming thing, because love, naturally, should be cherished and private).

Louis, for his part, sighs deeply and leans his head back against the grey fabric of the headrest. “If you say something like that again, I’ll cut off your balls. Much as that hurts us both, I’ll do what I have to do for the preservation of my mind.”

How rude, Harry thinks, and yet how much he agrees.

Then again: if Louis were to declare that he should be given control of the planet so that he may watch it burn, Harry would be the first to applaud. He’d probably be the only one to applaud, really.

“Should I try and turn it around here?” He asks, instead of attempting to lean forward and begin an impromptu make-out session in the middle of a godforsaken road in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere.  
At least there’d be a semblance of solitude, as opposed to a public library.

The rain doesn’t hold his attention like Louis does; he’s frowning, his eyebrows forming small ridges between them. It shouldn’t be hot, but Louis makes scowling seem lovely. At least the shades have come off. “What if another car comes? This date is shit enough without snapped limbs. Unless you’re into that, you know, because then we’re probably incompatible.”

“No,” Harry says, his voice as strong as he can make it. “I’m more into bestiality, if you get my drift.”

There’s a moment, Harry is sure, when Louis falls for it; his eyes widen so far that they almost swallow the rest of his face, and Harry could’ve made it as an actor. Perhaps he’s simply a natural liar.

The moment passes so that Harry might’ve tricked himself into it, if there was any light to have played on Louis’s features. “You’re fucking insane, you know. And your humour is sick.”

Letting his eyelids drop down, Harry nods. It’s blacker now than it was in the car, so they’re obviously not as screwed as he thought they were. And, there’s been no traffic for a while; not a single car has passed. They’re probably safe to break a shitload of road laws. “I’m sure that was what attracted you in the first place. My perverse humour and boyish charm.”

Louis lets the comment slide for a minute. A minute is fucking long, when it’s silent, and Harry didn’t really register it before. It gives him ample time to think about sucking Louis off, and other such salient things.

“Things in the dark,” Louis begins abruptly, “exist but are not realised.” Louis’s voice is softer than normal, mellowed by the night and the falling rain. “Perhaps with wings, they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins.”

Harry’s beginning to get a hunch that Louis goes home simply to read up on poetry so that he make (figuratively) knock Harry off his already unsteady balance. This time, at least, he’s breathless, and neither of them say anything, because there is nothing to say. The sheets of water speak for them, like they’re puppets.

The poetry has gone to his head like vodka, and he’s talking shit.

He moves on from the spontaneous poetry recital, and his words seem ungainly in contrast. “If you want,” He suggests quietly, as so not to ruin Louis’s now silent repose, “You can come back to mine. I’m basically Michelin starred at heating up leftovers.”

In the end, Louis does reply. “You do know how to treat a guy,” he says, but he’s a tosser who has the balls to lift Harry’s hand from the gearstick and try and tangle their fingers. It’s not like Louis to want to snuggle, or whatever. If they weren’t stuck in a strange road, Harry would be taking advantage of this faster than Louis could blink.

“Said we should’ve gone left,” He mutters, so that Louis peels himself away from Harry’s frame and stares at him in disgust. There’s too much shadow, even with the bright lightening of the inside of the car, to make out the darker specks inside his iris. “Next time, I’m choosing where we go.”

He starts up the engine (which groans like he’s tried to blow it up) (and Harry wouldn’t do that, since he is in no way an expert in the art of explosions), and once he’s completed the potentially life threatening U-turn, Louis mutters something that he doesn’t even try to catch.

There’s no leftovers at home, because his mum is probably punishing for skipping out on the revered _family dinner_. Since she’s gone out for the weekly exercise class down the road, he’s forced to cook up something semi decent to astound Louis with in the hopes that it could resurrect the bones of their date.

He allows himself to hope, anyway, because Louis tells him solemnly that he’s not all that shit at cooking, and follows it up by pressing their mouths together.

Outside, the rain still falls down, soaking into Louis as he walks back to the car, and Harry watches because he’s a classy pervert with the excuse that he’s got to make sure Louis can walk a few steps without tripping, and potentially breaking something. A cast is not a turn on.

The road shines with the slick water.

Harry’s still sure they should’ve gone left.


End file.
